Paleontologists have discovered the oldest fossil of a multicellular creature on Earth that lived in the primary ocean of the planet 2.4 billion years ago and is believed to be a fungus, according to an article published in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.
“It is possible that we were all looking for the ancestors of the mushrooms in the wrong place. We believed that they originated on land, in an aquatic, but not marine environment, and required developed soil and soil bacteria for their inception. It turned out that the ocean floor in the Proterozoic era could be an ideal refuge for the emergence of multicellular life, - commented on the study Nicola McLoughlin (Nicola McLoughlin) of Rhodes University in Grahamstown (South Africa).
Firstborn of the earth
The first living organisms appeared on Earth in the Archean era, and so far there is no generally accepted point of view about how and when life originated. Today, there is some fossil evidence that microbes already existed in the primary ocean of the Earth about 3.4 billion years ago, but many scientists believe that life could have originated much earlier - four or even 4.2 billion years ago.
Multicellular creatures, including plants, appeared much later - about 600-800 million years ago, shortly before the era of the so-called "Cambrian explosion" - a short period of time 550 million years ago, when all modern types of animals and ancestors of plants and fungi arose … Many scientists suggest that multicellular plants may have appeared much earlier, but no traces of this have yet been found.
Stefan Bengtson of the National Museum of Natural History in Stockholm, Sweden and his colleagues claim that the first multicellular organisms arose almost two billion years earlier, with the discovery of supposedly the oldest remains of a primitive mushroom in South Africa.
Bengtson and his team recently found the oldest algae in India, imprinted in 1.6 billion years old rocks, prompting them to look for other possible traces of life in the oldest sedimentary rocks on Earth.
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In this search, scientists relied on the popular idea today that life on Earth could arise not just in the ocean, but in the vicinity of underwater volcanoes and geothermal springs. They threw out a large amount of nutrients and chemical "food" for the first living organisms, which were noticeably less in other regions of the primary ocean.
Child of volcanoes
Studying the rocks that formed in the vicinity of such underwater volcanoes that existed on the site of modern South Africa 2.4 billion years ago, scientists came across the supposedly oldest example of multicellular life on Earth, which was not a plant or animal, but a fungus.
By studying volcanic rocks found in the vicinity of the town of Grikvastad in western South Africa, scientists have discovered deposits of many strange branching structures that scientists initially believed were microbial imprints. Having illuminated them with a particle accelerator in their laboratory, Bengtson and his colleagues realized that they were dealing with a multicellular and rather complex creature.
This creature, while an unnamed mushroom, grew on the ocean floor in the place of modern South Africa on the surface of lava ejections, which, as scientists assume, solidified about 10 million years before the formation of the fossil. Over time, the remains of these mushrooms were buried under the growths of chalk-like minerals, and in this form they have survived to our times.
According to the researchers, they have no doubts about the organic origin of these fossils, since both their structure and the complexity of their device could not be generated by inanimate nature. According to Bengtson, in the pictures of these mushrooms, you can see not only mycelium filaments, but also spores and hyphae - seals in the mycelium that absorb nutrients and water from the environment.
It is quite possible, Bengtson admits, that this creature was not a relative of modern mushrooms, but simply had a similar species and biology. In any case, their discovery, according to the scientist, pushes the existence of multicellular life several hundred million years back into the past.
A 2.4 billion year old mushroom remains found in volcanic rocks in South Africa / Bengtson et al. / Nature Ecology & Evolution 2017