Scientists have found our "mushroom ancestor" who lived a billion years ago.
A billion years - it's scary to even think - the mushroom found in the North of Canada turned out to be so ancient. It was investigated by scientists led by Corentin C. Loron from the University of Liege (Early Life Traces & Evolution – Astrobiology Laboratory, UR Astrobiology, Geology Department, University of Liege, Belgium). The results were reported in the journal Nature.
The spore and the filaments of the fungus are a billion years old.
Fossilized remains of the fungus in the form of its tiny - a tenth of a millimeter - spherical spores "mushroom pickers" found in shale deposits. We saw that these spheres are multicellular, intertwined with threads. Both of them contained chitin, which is characteristic of fungi - even modern ones have it.
The billion-year-old mushroom is about 600 million years older - almost an eternity - older than any of its predecessors. And it is quite possible that he and his contemporaries were among the first to appear on Earth. And developing, they became the progenitors of all other creatures. Including people. After all, mushrooms and animals are evolutionarily closely related. We are all - opistocontes - opistocontes, speaking even more scientifically. That is, we represent one kindred group.
A related dispute: we and mushrooms of the same breed are metazhgutic.
The ancestor mushroom is named Ourasphaira giraldae. The oldest animals found by scientists are much younger than him. For example, Dickinsonia - a kind of soft symmetrical cakes that resembled feathers or palm branches - originated on Earth 558 million years ago. And perhaps they became descendants of mushrooms. By the way, they themselves were at one time considered mushrooms. But in the end they were ranked among the animals.
More about this An animal that first appeared on Earth was found.
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The first living thing is a descendant of a fungus, but not a fungus.
But let's return to the mushrooms … And remember the television hoax of Sergei Kuryokhin and Sergei Sholokhov, which they staged back in 1991 in the program "The Fifth Wheel". They showed a bold, even for those times, plot "Lenin-mushroom". Comic, of course. But then the years passed and he had a very serious scientific basis. Without suspecting it, paleontologists from the Geological Survey of Canada, Laurentian University and the Paris Institute of Earth Physics, who, together with scientists from Liege, studied a mushroom that grew at the origins of evolution, let her down.
VLADIMIR LAGOVSKY