Scientists Find One-Billion-Year-Old Fungus In The Canadian Arctic
Image: Corentin Loron et al
Scientists have discovered fossils of a fungus that lived roughly one billion years ago—yes, billion—making it over twice as old as any other fungi specimens identified to date. The discovery, announced on Wednesday in Nature, not only pushes the fossil record of fungi back by about 600 million years, it also suggests that other eukaryotic organisms—a group that includes complex multicellular life-forms like animals—may have originated around the same time as O. giraldae, in the mid-Proterozoic age. Scientists have also presented possible fungi fossils predating the Cambrian explosion, a sudden proliferation of complex life that occurred 541 million years ago, but those specimens are not considered to be definitive proof of Precambrian fungi.
Source: www.vice.com