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Mushrooms are so much more than a garnish on your pizza. Although this unpretentious kingdom of organisms may not get the same love or the same respect as plants or animals, they play an incredibly crucial role in the story of life on planet Earth.
That's why scientists are so excited to announce the discovery of the oldest fossil fungi in the world. The tiny fossils date from 900 million to 1 billion years ago, repelling the previously confirmed record holder for the world first mushroom fossil nearly half a billion years old.
At the age of 1 billion, it seems that this discovery could also be a candidate for one of the first multicellular lives on earth.
"Mushrooms are one of the most diverse eukaryotic groups known to date and, despite this, their ancient fossil record is very rare," Corentin Loron, author of the report, told IFLScience. study, study.
Reported in the newspaper Nature, the Ourasphaira giraldae microfossils were found in the shale of the Arctic coast of the Northwest Territories of Canada. With the help of an electron microscope, Loron and his team were able to identify tiny structures – double-layered cell walls, branching filaments, and spore-shaped spheres – that suggested that it was safe. worked well mushrooms. Cell walls also contained chitin, just like modern mushrooms. It is interesting to note that older fossils have been discovered and that some scientists suggest that it is fungi, but they are not confirmed.
It is not known how the mushroom appeared in shale. Although it is possible that he lived in the water and simply evacuated, the team says he was actually a man on the ground.
"We can not know for sure whether O. Giraldae lived on the ground, but the rocks in which it was deposited are estuarine. Maybe these organisms, which need external food sources, lived in an estuarine environment, which would have provided everything a mushroom would need, "added Loron.
Mushrooms were the vital architects of the modern ecosystem. They are the largest decomposers of organic matter and play a major role in the carbon cycle and in the release of nutrients related to organic matter. With the help of early plants, they helped transform Earth's land in a ground covered ground, perfect for the complex life.
Previously, it was assumed that primitive plants and mushrooms came together, forming an intimate partnership that contributed to the creation of the earth's terrestrial ecosphere as we know it, there are about 420 million 39; years. With this new discovery, however, it appears that fungi have been established over more than 450 million years of preparatory work. the plants came to colonize Earth.
The new discovery also suggests that animal life may have started much earlier than our current estimate suggests.
"This discovery is interesting because mushrooms are, in" the tree of life ", the closest relative of animals. That means if the mushrooms are already present about 900 to 1,000 million years ago, the animals should be there too, "Loron continued.
"This is reshaping our view of the world because these two groups, as well as other eukaryotic groups like algae, are still present today. This distant past, although very different from today, may have been much more "modern" than we thought. "
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