![]() ![]() “So that this entire web of life is connected and it’s connected through the fungi.” “It’s how everything is reborn,” says Dunn. “They break down dead, organic matter and by doing that they release nutrients and those nutrients are then made available for plants to carry on growing.” “ are the garbage disposal agents of the natural world,” according to Cardiff University biosciences professor Lynne Boddy. Without fungi to aid in decomposition, all life in the forest would soon be buried under a mountain of dead plant matter. “And so we seem to have cooked out the fungal pathogens.” Fungi are master decomposers that keep our forests alive “The warm-bloodedness of mammals, including ourselves, has evolved, in part, as a response to the pressure from fungus,” says Rob Dunn, a professor at North Carolina State University. Those surviving mammals are the evolutionary ancestors of every mammal on the planet today, from civet cats to water buffalo to us. “The reptiles are quite susceptible to fungal diseases, but your typical mammal, which maintains a temperature in the mid 30’s or so, creates a thermal exclusionary zone for fungi.” “They’re hot,” explains Arturo Casadevall, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University. Photographer Steve Axford Documents The Beauty of Fungi When that happened, mammals had one key advantage over cold-blooded reptiles, then the planet’s dominant life forms.įungi Paved The Way For Humans To Evolve In The Aftermath Of A Deadly Asteroid Strike The lack of sunlight that followed the asteroid impact meant that the plant life that didn’t die on impact would start to decay rapidly, creating the conditions for fungi to spread rapidly. Roughly 65 million years ago, an asteroid strike would wipe out 70 percent of all life on Earth. Francis Hueber of the Smithsonian, the Prototaxites met their end at the hands of evolving insects, who started using them as a source of food. Prototaxites were megafungi that could be up to eight metres in height.Īn artist's rendering of what protoaxites might have looked like based on the fossils they left behind.įor over a hundred years after the discovery of the first Prototaxites fossils, scientists argued about whether they were fungi, trees, lichens or plants.Īccording to research by Dr. But enormous fungi towered over the landscape. The only animals living on land were invertebrates. Three hundred and sixty million years ago, in the Devonian era, there were no trees yet. Fungi were once the tallest life forms on the plant The fungi provided essential minerals for land plants that allowed them to spread and turn the planet green - changing the composition of the atmosphere. “Ultimately, fungi helped plants move away from being these marginal tiny little things on the water’s edge into large forests and entire ecosystems,” explains Katie Field, an associate professor in plant-soil interactions at the University of Leeds. In the Late Ordovician era, they formed a symbiotic relationship with liverworts, the earliest plants. Fungi drove evolution on landįungi were some of the first complex life forms on land, mining rocks for mineral nourishment, slowly turning them into what would become soil. Here are a few things we found out about the hidden world we pass by every day on The Nature of Things documentary The Kingdom: How Fungi Made Our World. Fungi produce molecules that humans still can’t reproduce in a lab, and we’re only beginning to scrape the surface of what we can learn from them. “Fungi are absolutely remarkable chemists,” says McMaster University biochemistry professor Gerry Wright. In fact, neither land plants nor terrestrial animals would exist them. During a billion years of evolution, they’ve become masters of survival.Īnd yet, fungi have also been integral to the development of life on Earth. Neither plants nor animals, fungi are the most underappreciated kingdom of the natural world. ![]()
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