Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter briefly touched on this idea in The Light of Other Days. (Spoiler) The book is primarily concerned with the development of

Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter briefly touched on this idea in The Light of Other Days. (Spoiler) The book is primarily concerned with the development of a miniaturized wormhole technology which allows remote viewing anywhere on Earth, and the effects this has on privacy, etc. They discover it can also be used to view backwards in time, and at the end of the book they trace the tree of life backwards towards the universal common ancestor, and discover that it was a microbe seeded deep in a geothermal vent by a civilization of intelligent trilobyte/arthropod like creatures, which knew its own extinction was imminent at the hand of a massive asteroid.