Simon Hooper and CNN's Maggie Lake, Paula Newton and Jim Clancy contributed to this report.

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Staying on Olkhon Island, in the middle of Lake Baikal in Eastern Siberia, Simon went to look up the local museum curator.

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But in Mono Lake in California, Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues had found a type of bacteria, GFAJ-1, that seemed to have replaced phosphorus with arsenic.

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Wolfe-Simon and her colleagues found the critter in a lake in eastern California with high arsenic concentrations.

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