It’s a plant! It’s a fungus! Is it…an entirely new type of life form previously unknown to science?

This seems to be the case for a mysterious spire-shaped creature that lived more than 400 million years ago, according to one researcher. new research Published in a magazine science progress. After analyzing its internal structure, the authors claim that the mysterious ancient creatures known as prototaxites do not belong to any existing biological kingdom.

“It just doesn’t feel like a comfortable fit anywhere,” said Matthew Nelsen, a principal investigator at the Field Museum of Natural History who was not involved in the study. said scientific american. “People try to shoehorn it into different groups, but there’s always something that doesn’t make sense.”

The name Prototachytes means “early yew” or “first yew,” a misnomer that has captured debate over its nature for more than a century. Because of its resemblance to a tree trunk, scientists initially suspected it was an extinct species of tree when the fossil was first unearthed in 1855.

This assumption would probably make the prototaxites uncomfortable if they were still alive and hearing. In fact, this unusual column likely appeared before the first trees appeared on Earth some 400 million years ago, and at an estimated height of about 26 feet, it would have definitely towered over other land creatures at the time.

What was the nature of these colossi? When it became clear that it was not a plant, scientific speculation arose. In the decades since its discovery, the consensus that it is a type of algae has changed. And in recent decades, suspicions have arisen that it might be some sort of giant fungus. Contains carbon isotopes normally found in these organisms.

Boldly, the authors of the new paper we have been following Tell everyone it’s all wrong, even before it’s peer-reviewed. The fossil’s tubular structures are wild and diverse, unlike the more regular structures of modern fungi. siam he pointed out. They also couldn’t detect any trace of chitin, a chemical that makes up the cell walls of all known fungi.

“There doesn’t seem to be anything characteristic of living fungal communities,” said co-lead author Laura Cooper, a researcher at the University of Edinburg. siamadding that many aspects of its biology, as well as its taxonomy, are beyond our understanding. “How it actually works energetically is still a complete mystery.”

Some argue that prototaxites are an entirely extinct lineage of fungi, but if that’s true, that means they had to evolve into a new form of complex life on their own, which is surprising in itself, according to Kevin Boyce, a paleobotanist at Stanford University who co-authored a 2022 paper on the organisms with Nelsen. “No matter what,” Boyce said. siam“There’s something strange about him doing things on his own.”

But Cooper continues to insist that prototaxites are too “fundamentally different” to be pushed into the fungi category. Science doesn’t like outliers. So if it’s completely new, there may be something similar that we haven’t found yet. “The next step will be to find other fossil life forms with similar chemical fingerprints in order to trace this mysterious life form through the tree of life,” said Vivi Vajda, a paleontologist at the Swedish Museum of Natural History. said science.

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