( ce the world that it was indeed a fungu...)Prehistoric mystery organism verified as giant fungus

Co-authoring the Geology paper with Boyce, Hotton and Hueber himself were Marilyn Fogel, George Cody and Robert Hazen of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, and Andrew Knoll of Harvard University. Their work was funded by NASA’s Astrobiology Institute and by the American Chemical Society Petroleum Fund.

Prototaxites lived worldwide from approximately 420 million to 350 million years ago. During this period, which spans part of the Silurian and Devonian periods of geologic time, terrestrial Earth looked quite alien in comparison to the modern world.

Simple vascular plants, the ancestors of the familiar conifers, ferns and flowering plants of today, began to diversify on land during the Devonian Period. "Initially, they’re just stems. They don’t have roots. They don’t have leaves. They don’t have anything like that," Boyce said.

Millipedes, wingless insects and worms were among the other organisms making a living on land by then, but no backboned animals had yet evolved out of the oceans. "That world was a very strange place," Boyce said.

Although vascular plants had established themselves on land 40 million years before the appearance of Prototaxites, the tallest among them stood no more than a couple feet high. By the end of the Devonian, approximately 345 million years ago, large trees, ferns, seeds, leaves and roots had all evolved. "They’re all there. They just exploded over this one time period," Boyce said.

Canadian paleontologist Charles Dawson published the first research on Prototaxites in 1859, based on specimens found along the shores of Gaspé Bay in Quebec, Canada. Hueber pored through Dawson’s field notebooks, written "in a completely illegible scrawl," Hotton said.

"Fran spent months deciphering them for clues about the localities where specimens had been collected, how Dawson interpreted them and other information that helpe
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Source:University of Chicago