[Junior]

The article doesn't say these virii are the originals, only that their existence might help in understanding early life on Earth. It's kind of like those critters living around the black smokers under the Atlantic; they're not the earliest life on Earth, but they give clues as to where life might have started.

[malakhi]

That's what I thought at first, too. But they seemed to be asserting something further when they said:

After characterizing the structure and genome of the virus, they found that its protein shell was similar to a bacterial virus and an animal virus. The similarity suggests to the scientists that the three viruses may share a common ancestor that predates the branching off of life forms more than 3 billion years ago...

Now that scientists know the Yellowstone virus's ancient structure seems to span all three domains of life...

Aren't they saying that the interesting thing about the virus is that it exhibits features predating the branching off of life forms?