Jan 23, 2025 01:39 AM
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-new...-13709647/
EXCERPTS: When land plants were still the relatively new kids on the evolutionary block and the world’s tallest trees reached only a few feet in height, giant spires of life poked from the Earth.
Fossils of these mysterious stalks, dating to between 350 million and 420 million years ago, reveal “trunks up to 24 feet … high and as wide as 3 feet,” reported National Geographic’s Anne Minard in 2007.
“Plants at that time were a few feet tall, invertebrate animals were small, and there were no terrestrial vertebrates,” geophysicist Kevin Boyce, now at Stanford University, told New Scientist’s Catherine Brahic in 2007. “This fossil would have been all the more striking in such a diminutive landscape.”
[...] But the spires, known today as Prototaxites (pro-toh-tax-eye-tees), weren’t made of wood. Researchers offered even more ideas for their identity: kelp-like aquatic algae, fruiting bodies of fungi or even lichens, which are partnerships between fungi and algae. The debate has raged for more than 150 years.
Today, Prototaxites are most widely accepted to be fungi. The work of the late Francis Hueber, a paleobotanist with the National Museum of Natural History, had a lot to do with that—he mapped the internal structure of the fossils and found their anatomy to be more fungus-like than plant-like. But he hadn’t found a “smoking gun” that would prove it.
[...] Not everyone was sold on the idea that Prototaxites represented early fungi. [...] Science can be messy, and despite more than a century of digging, researchers still debate the precise identity of these huge spires that dominated the early Earth.
If they truly were primitive fungi, Boyce and ecologist Matthew P. Nelsen wrote in 2022, they probably have no living descendants today. But through their fossils, we can imagine a long-lost world where Prototaxites might have towered above everything else... (MORE - missing details)
https://youtu.be/v3ZJdgXV4fk
EXCERPTS: When land plants were still the relatively new kids on the evolutionary block and the world’s tallest trees reached only a few feet in height, giant spires of life poked from the Earth.
Fossils of these mysterious stalks, dating to between 350 million and 420 million years ago, reveal “trunks up to 24 feet … high and as wide as 3 feet,” reported National Geographic’s Anne Minard in 2007.
“Plants at that time were a few feet tall, invertebrate animals were small, and there were no terrestrial vertebrates,” geophysicist Kevin Boyce, now at Stanford University, told New Scientist’s Catherine Brahic in 2007. “This fossil would have been all the more striking in such a diminutive landscape.”
[...] But the spires, known today as Prototaxites (pro-toh-tax-eye-tees), weren’t made of wood. Researchers offered even more ideas for their identity: kelp-like aquatic algae, fruiting bodies of fungi or even lichens, which are partnerships between fungi and algae. The debate has raged for more than 150 years.
Today, Prototaxites are most widely accepted to be fungi. The work of the late Francis Hueber, a paleobotanist with the National Museum of Natural History, had a lot to do with that—he mapped the internal structure of the fossils and found their anatomy to be more fungus-like than plant-like. But he hadn’t found a “smoking gun” that would prove it.
[...] Not everyone was sold on the idea that Prototaxites represented early fungi. [...] Science can be messy, and despite more than a century of digging, researchers still debate the precise identity of these huge spires that dominated the early Earth.
If they truly were primitive fungi, Boyce and ecologist Matthew P. Nelsen wrote in 2022, they probably have no living descendants today. But through their fossils, we can imagine a long-lost world where Prototaxites might have towered above everything else... (MORE - missing details)
https://youtu.be/v3ZJdgXV4fk