Prototaxites Mystery Solved? Wednesday, Feb 10 2010
random 2:44 pm
Around 420 million years ago, during the Silurian, the ground was only colonized by non-vascular shrubs and tiny insects, except for one exception: Prototaxites. These primitive, fungus-like spires reached up to 8 m (26 ft) in height, by far the largest organisms on land at the time. For decades, paleontologists have wondered what the hell these things really were.
Now, a small group of scientists think they have the answer. Their results were recently published in the American Journal of Botany. Their article, “Structural, physiological, and stable carbon isotopic evidence that the enigmatic Paleozoic fossil Prototaxites formed from rolled liverwort mats”, is available for free for the next 30 days only.
Coming on the heels of a discovery that Ediacaran organisms had musculature, this year has been a good start for paleontology. That Ediacaran finding contradicts the doubtful paper from 2008 that asserts that giant protists may be responsible for pre-Cambrian ichnofossils attributed to early bilaterians, and another paper that argues that the Ediacaran fauna were lichens.
I thought Prototaxites was found to be a giant fungi. This was in a TED presentation by Paul Stamets.
Link to vid: http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/258
It was on TED, so it must be true!
The idea that Prototaxites was a fungus was always just a guess. I can understand why a mycologist would want to include it in his talk, but in doing so he was taking a risk that Prototaxites would ultimately be revealed not to be fungi, as is apparently the case here, though the case may not be closed.
Why does prototaxites have to fit in any of the boxes we already know so well.Is the idea of something unknown and unknowable so frightening.Why not consider fungi,cyanobacteria,liverworts and vascular plants as decendant pieces of it.