evolution: earliest land fungi (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, January 22, 2020, 19:42 (1765 days ago) @ David Turell

Found in the Congo dated between 715 and 810 million years ago:

https://phys.org/news/2020-01-mushrooms-earlier-previously-thought.html

"The origin and evolution of the kingdom Fungi—more commonly known as mushrooms—are still very mysterious. Only 2 percent of species have been identified, and their delicate nature means fossils are extremely rare and difficult to discern from other microorganisms. Until now, the oldest confirmed mushroom fossil was 460 million years old.

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"The fossilized remains of mycelium (a network of interconnected microscopic strands) were discovered in rocks between 715 and 810 million years old—during a time in Earth's history when life on the continents' surface was in its infancy. These ancient rocks, found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and part of the collection of the Africa Museum on Tervuren, formed in a lagoon or coastal lake environment. "The presence of fungi in this transitional area between water and land leads us to believe that these microscopic mushrooms were important partners of the first plants that colonized the Earth's surface around 500 million years ago," explains Steeve Bonneville, professor at the Université libre de Bruxelles and coordinator of the study.

"Previous mushroom fossils had been identified only based on the morphology of organic remains extracted from rocks using corrosive acid compounds. "This method damages the chemistry of organic fossils and only allows morphological analysis, which can lead to incorrect interpretations because certain morphological characteristics are common to different branches of living organisms," Bonneville says.

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"'This is a major discovery, and one that prompts us to reconsider our timeline of the evolution of organisms on Earth," says Bonneville. "The next step will be to look further back in time, in even more ancient rocks, for evidence of those microorganisms that are truly at the origins of the animal kingdom.'"

Comment: As we know, the advance of evolution from bacteria takes lots of time