Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life
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Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life
#2Prototaxites, an ancient treetrunk-mushroom-like organism that preceded land plants about 400M yr ago. Its fossils contained plantlike lignin instead of funguslike chitin or chitosan.
Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life
#3> Prototaxites did not contain chitin, a major building block of fungal cell walls and a hallmark of the fungal kingdom. The Prototaxites fossils instead appeared to contain chemicals similar to lignin, which is found in the wood and bark of plants. ... best considered a member of a previously undescribed, entirely extinct group of eukaryotes
So these are the ancestors of Groot? or Ents? and all manner of "animated trees"?
Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life
#4Pretty sure this was a major plot point of the latest resident evil game.
Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life
#5There’s one of them at the back of my fridge.
Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life
#6Common Side Effects, here we come.
Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life
#7I'm still trying to wrap my head around nitroplasts, another newfound plastid.
Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life
#8Is there a point in Earth’s history where if you were to visit you’d find it was just a fungus planet, with no other form of life? Could there have been fungal type creatures that lived, died, and left no trace?
Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life
#9> with eukarya containing all multicellular organisms within the four kingdoms of fungi, animals, plants and protists.
This bugs me so much. The four-kingdom system should have died out decades ago, it's absurdly wrong. For one thing, fungi and animals should be together (opisthokonts) if you're dividing eukaryotes into the major groups. If you consider genetics, there's no such thing as "protists", they're just a whole bunch of small things that were grouped together because we didn't know otherwise.
It's more like, Archaeplastida, Excavata, SAR supergroup, Amoebozoa, and Opisthokonta at the moment. The exact list is up for debate, and currently undergoing change. There's plenty of weird things like Hemimastigophora and we're not really sure where they fit yet.
Re: Giant, fungus-like organism may be a completely unknown branch of life
#10Is there a point in Earth’s history where if you were to visit you’d find it was just a fungus planet, with no other form of life? Could there have been fungal type creatures that lived, died, and left no trace?
No, non-fungi single celled organisms have existed at all times that fungi have existed on earth.