This hypothesis was originally proposed by James A. Lake and colleagues in 1984 based on the discovery that the shapes of ribosomes in the Crenarcaeota and eukaryotes are more similar to each other than to either bacteria or the second major kingdom of archaea, the Euryarchaeota.
The reconstruction of two highly unusual archaeal genomes by de novo metagenomic assembly of multiple, deeply sequenced libraries via multi-locus phylogenetic analyses, from surface waters of Lake Tyrrell, a hypersaline lake in north-west Victoria, Australia, has led to the creation of a major novel euryarchaeal lineage, distantly related to halophilic archaea of class Halobacteria.