Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Stuff to blow your mind. My name
Speaker 1: is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Speaker 1: Time to go into the vault. Today we're going to
Speaker 1: be listening to an episode that originally published December seventeen
Speaker 1: nineteen about gigantic prehistoric fungus. That's right, prototaxites, I believe
Speaker 1: is the pronunciation. I think, I think we we labored
Speaker 1: over it enough that it's stuck in my head. But
Speaker 1: this is a fun one. I think we we did
Speaker 1: a little skit for this one with time travelers. At
Speaker 1: the beginning, the time traveler, for so it will be
Speaker 1: convenient to speak of him, turned his attention at last
Speaker 1: the Devonian period. His pale gray eyes shone and twinkled,
Speaker 1: and his usually pale face became flushed and animated. The
Speaker 1: calm of morning was upon the world world, and it's greening,
Speaker 1: the spring time of the Earth. The environment was arid
Speaker 1: and warm, and everywhere I walked I observed forests of
Speaker 1: moss and clusters of shrub like ferns, and horse tails.
Speaker 1: Amid them crept primitive arthropods and something that looked remarkably
Speaker 1: like a winged insect, though I did not catch it
Speaker 1: in the act of flight. But there were no leaves,
Speaker 1: no true trees to lift a canopy above my head.
Speaker 1: But what I at first took for primitive conifers proved anything.
Speaker 1: But each of these cylindrical giants stood some twenty feet high,
Speaker 1: and we were a good yard wide. They towered above
Speaker 1: the Devonian world like skylight pillars, and I observed just
Speaker 1: a hint of scores carried away from their bizarre heights.
Speaker 1: I wonder, then, might these organisms be giant mushrooms? But
Speaker 1: that's when the more locks came at me. The more locks,
Speaker 1: I said, surely, the more locks existed far in the future.
Speaker 1: What were they doing in the Devonian? Well, they stole
Speaker 1: my time machine and they followed me. But you arrived
Speaker 1: there in your time, Well, they stole it from the future.
Speaker 1: But the look time travel is very complicated. No further questions.
Speaker 1: Welcome to have to blow your mind? A production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radios has to work. Hey, are you welcome
Speaker 1: to stuff to blow your mind? My name is Robert
Speaker 1: Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick. And in that cold open
Speaker 1: we had a little fun with H. G. Wells. The
Speaker 1: time machine, which of course is a is a wonderful novel,
Speaker 1: well worth seeking out even in today's uh technically advanced times.
Speaker 1: I remember liking it when I read it, but I
Speaker 1: don't recall does he actually go into the prehistoric past. Well,
Speaker 1: he certainly goes into the far, far future, which is
Speaker 1: kind of my inspiration for that, because he goes he
Speaker 1: goes so far into the future that the world is
Speaker 1: just an alien landscape. But one of the fun things
Speaker 1: is that if you travel back far enough in time,
Speaker 1: you also encounter an alien landscape like that is what
Speaker 1: the surface world of the Devonian period four hundred million
Speaker 1: years ago basically was, and so it was irresistible to
Speaker 1: use the time traveler. Here is a is a way
Speaker 1: of sort of the magic name what it might be
Speaker 1: like to walk amid the strangely strange specimens. That's all
Speaker 1: this weird Devonian flora and a glimpse in the wild,
Speaker 1: a living specimen of an organism that continues to mystify
Speaker 1: us in the past. It's been called a mystery fossil
Speaker 1: even and that is proto tax i t s. Yes,
Speaker 1: today we are going to be talking about the world
Speaker 1: of prehistoric fungus. This is something that I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about for a long time because fungus in the
Speaker 1: fossil record. I think there's actually a lot of interesting
Speaker 1: stuff we could explore. But the keystone of today's episode
Speaker 1: is going to be, Yeah, the fossil remains of these
Speaker 1: giant stylite organisms from hundreds of millions of years ago
Speaker 1: that we're the tallest standing things of their time, and
Speaker 1: we don't know for sure what they were. We have
Speaker 1: we have better ideas than we used to, and we'll
Speaker 1: get into that as the episode goes on. But yeah,
Speaker 1: try to imagine yourself as a paleontologist digging into the
Speaker 1: strata from a pure it hundreds of millions of years ago,
Speaker 1: where there were no trees, there's no there are no
Speaker 1: forests on the Earth, but you find these six meter
Speaker 1: high giant pillars of something that was alive. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you can see if you look up the images of
Speaker 1: prototax it t s, you'll you'll see people posing with
Speaker 1: the fossil remnants. Uh. And it looks like like a
Speaker 1: massive pillar or even in the way it's broken in
Speaker 1: some of these uh, these fossils, it looks like it
Speaker 1: could be the you know, the neckbone of some of
Speaker 1: some enormous creature. Like there's an enormity to the fossil
Speaker 1: uh that that makes it so irresistible. It is a
Speaker 1: giant of the past, but it is not. It is
Speaker 1: not an animal, it is it is something else. We
Speaker 1: don't know exactly what prototax it t s looked like
Speaker 1: when it was alive. They are different interpretations of it,
Speaker 1: but some of the interpretations uh and in resulting illustrations
Speaker 1: really give it a kind of almost like a gigaresque
Speaker 1: or love crafty and appearance of something that looks truly
Speaker 1: like a um like like pillars, like towers, like little
Speaker 1: mom like not little you know, towering monoliths um and
Speaker 1: and certainly they were the largest and tallest feature of
Speaker 1: the Devonian terrestrial environment. It dominated the early and early
Speaker 1: Middle Devonian period, though it eventually gives way to the
Speaker 1: rise of shrubs and early and other early plants in
Speaker 1: the Late Devonian. But it is, to say the least,
Speaker 1: a very tantalizing fossil that can continues to be something
Speaker 1: of a mystery fossil. So to to get to the
Speaker 1: origin of the fossil find itself, we have to go
Speaker 1: back roughly a hundred and seventy six years, and that
Speaker 1: is when in eighteen forty three Canadian born geologist William
Speaker 1: Edmund Logan unearthed fossil remnants of Devonian flora. And the
Speaker 1: classification of the Devonian period, by the way, only dates
Speaker 1: back to the eighteen thirties, so it was you know,
Speaker 1: kind of a revolutionary time and just geologic discovery in general.
Speaker 1: The name of the Devonian, of course, comes from the
Speaker 1: Devon area in England, where some of these uh fossil
Speaker 1: finds come from. So Logan found uh these specimens in
Speaker 1: the exposed sections of a Devonian rock on the shores
Speaker 1: of the believe it's gossip a bay in Quebec, and
Speaker 1: particularly an area is called seal Cove, which he was
Speaker 1: mapping for coal and other minerals. Well, this fits in
Speaker 1: with a great Canadian tradition of of awesome fossil sites
Speaker 1: being discovered in you know, not originally by paleontologists, but
Speaker 1: by people developing industry and heavy heavy transport and stuff like.
Speaker 1: I think about how the the shale beds like the
Speaker 1: Burgess Shale and the Canadian rockies were originally found because
Speaker 1: railroad workers who were building railroads through the area. We're
Speaker 1: finding these stone bugs everywhere, and that eventually attracted the
Speaker 1: attention of paleontologists to come in and us to gate.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, the world of trilobytes, right, and other creatures
Speaker 1: of course, which we'll get back to later. So I
Speaker 1: want to note that one of one of my key
Speaker 1: sources on the the early history of this fossil find
Speaker 1: uh comes to us from paleo biologist of Francis Huber
Speaker 1: of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, d C.
Speaker 1: Who wrote a two thousand and one piece titled Rotted
Speaker 1: Wood Algae Fungus The History and Life of prototax I T. S. Dawson,
Speaker 1: eight fifty nine. And it's just a tremendous source on
Speaker 1: all of this. But it's also very concerned with naming, renaming,
Speaker 1: and misnaming things, even getting into the various names used
Speaker 1: by Logan and others to designate the cove in which
Speaker 1: they found this. But at times it may seem a
Speaker 1: little tedious if if you read it in full, but
Speaker 1: UH fair enough citation and uh in miscitation and the
Speaker 1: illegitimate renaming of things is a vital part of this
Speaker 1: fossil's human history. Yeah, well, you know, you've got to
Speaker 1: get people to agree on what they call things, or
Speaker 1: it's gonna be a lot harder to talk about them
Speaker 1: and can become quite a dramatic issue as well. Unraveled here. So,
Speaker 1: in eighteen fifty five, Logan's Devonian Flora fossils passed into
Speaker 1: the hands of noted Canadian geologist John William Dawson, who,
Speaker 1: by the way, the mineral Dawsonite is named in his honor.
Speaker 1: He was particularly taken by a large specimen with the
Speaker 1: with the peculiar interior structure. It resembled a large tree,
Speaker 1: but under a microscope he became clear that the fossilized
Speaker 1: tissue was uh solicified, you know, containing an entangled mesh
Speaker 1: that resembled fungal my cilia. He even noted the mysilia
Speaker 1: resemblance himself in his writings, but he didn't really explore
Speaker 1: it further. Uh, I mean, he did not explore the
Speaker 1: explore the fungal angle further, but he was very interested
Speaker 1: in this fossil. He traveled to seal Cove himself and
Speaker 1: obtained a dish l samples. Okay, so they've found this
Speaker 1: giant fossilized trunk of something. It looks like it could
Speaker 1: be the trunk of a tree, but examining it on
Speaker 1: a microscopic level, it looks more like the texture of
Speaker 1: fungus than it does the texture of plant matter. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: particularly my cilia and then mysilium is the vegetative part
Speaker 1: of a fungus. Just reminded everybody. It's a It's a
Speaker 1: mass of branching vein like hiphe that you'll find underground
Speaker 1: or in whatever. The mushroom or the fruiting body is
Speaker 1: emerging from the mushroom itself is a death emergence. Life
Speaker 1: is actually thriving beneath the surface. The mushroom comes up
Speaker 1: to to release spores. Yeah, it's a reproductive organ. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: the way Dawson interpreted this, this this fossil was Okay,
Speaker 1: we have something that looks like like fungus. So what
Speaker 1: we have here is probably a rotting conifer tree, you know,
Speaker 1: an early conifer tree. It's rotting, it's decomposing. So I'm
Speaker 1: seeing the decomposed their fungus within the decomposing uh specimen,
Speaker 1: all of this preserved in a single fossil specimen. Well,
Speaker 1: that would make sense. It's it is a tree trunk.
Speaker 1: It's infested with fungal Mysilia type structures, right, and so
Speaker 1: he gave it the name prototax I T S. Or essentially,
Speaker 1: first you referring to the U family texas cia, so
Speaker 1: the U tree right. Yeah, So so the the actual
Speaker 1: name is is referring to UH conifer resemblance. So he
Speaker 1: puts these eyes ideas out there, and then, um, you know,
Speaker 1: quite as a surprise to Dawson, a Scottish botanist by
Speaker 1: the name of William C. Carruthers proposed a different interpretation. Uh.
Speaker 1: He said, well, this is perhaps the fossil remains of
Speaker 1: a very large algae aquatic or perhaps terrestrial in nature. Algae,
Speaker 1: of course, can grow in weird places like on ice
Speaker 1: and snow. So he declared a new name. He said, Nope,
Speaker 1: we're not going to call this prototax I T S.
Speaker 1: We're gonna call this nemato ficus. Okay, but wait a minute.
Speaker 1: An algae that like a giant fossilized algae the size
Speaker 1: of a tree trunk. Yeah yeah, I mean that's creepy.
Speaker 1: Well yeah. One of the things, and this is pointed
Speaker 1: out by others that have studied, is like, there's basically
Speaker 1: no non weird explanation for this weird fossil. We'll get
Speaker 1: to several comments like that later. Yeah, there's no like
Speaker 1: normal way of looking at it. Now, Here's here's the
Speaker 1: thing about Carruthers coming along and saying, no, this is
Speaker 1: nemo nemato ficus. First of all, there are rules with
Speaker 1: the naming of things, even at the time, so you're
Speaker 1: not allowed to just come and give it a new
Speaker 1: name that it's an illegitimate renaming. So so that alone
Speaker 1: is kind of weird and and rude. But then also,
Speaker 1: according to Huber, Carruthers was just scathing and very personal
Speaker 1: in his criticism. Quote scathing and slanderous uh in terms
Speaker 1: of critic as sizing Dawson, and it seemed to have
Speaker 1: like really caught Dawson off guard. Um, you know, based
Speaker 1: on these descriptions, one is tempted. I don't do not
Speaker 1: know much about William C. Carruthers, but but just based
Speaker 1: on Huber's writing, one is tempted debut Caruthers is something
Speaker 1: of a bully in his field while also being an
Speaker 1: extremely respected botanist. But then again, perhaps our our our
Speaker 1: vision of this rivalry is incomplete. Well, if that interpretation
Speaker 1: is correct, he would not be the only legitimately good
Speaker 1: scientist who also is lacking in manners and hire another
Speaker 1: so um. According to Huber, Dawson fought for his initial classification,
Speaker 1: but but then later he ends up rejecting it, apparently
Speaker 1: even trying to make it seem as as if he
Speaker 1: never connected the fossil to conifers at all. And then
Speaker 1: he himself, in his eight book The Geological History of
Speaker 1: Plants illegitimately used the name nomato ficus instead of Prototaxi
Speaker 1: t suh. So I imagine that, at least to the
Speaker 1: time that Huber was writing in like two thousand one,
Speaker 1: you don't do this. You don't just like switch the
Speaker 1: name to something else without a I don't know. I'd
Speaker 1: imagine a lot of fields have like an international naming
Speaker 1: committee that if there is going to be a name change,
Speaker 1: would have to agree on it or something. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's it's why for instance, uh, like one's fossil that
Speaker 1: we've discussed on the on the show before U Basilosaurus okay,
Speaker 1: uh I hear saw us in there. That means lizard,
Speaker 1: it means king lizard. But it was not. We know
Speaker 1: now it was not a lizard at all. It was
Speaker 1: a mammal. But we we we don't go back and
Speaker 1: change the name in this case. So it's a similar
Speaker 1: case here. The name prototax I t stuck and did
Speaker 1: stick despite carruthers uh notion that we should switch to
Speaker 1: a different name, and that name also Prototaxids, is still
Speaker 1: used today but names aside. So Carruthers is pushing this interpretation. Okay,
Speaker 1: this is not a rotting conifer tree that's full of
Speaker 1: kind of fungal infestation. This is a giant alga. So
Speaker 1: what happens with this interpretation, Well, this becomes the dominant
Speaker 1: interpretation for a while, and it basically goes unquestioned until
Speaker 1: nineteen nineteen when one Ah Church brings up the possibility
Speaker 1: that this is a fungus after all, considering the size
Speaker 1: is achieved by by certain contemporary fungus specimens such as uh,
Speaker 1: you know, various woody decomposer fun guy. But this idea
Speaker 1: didn't take off. He seems to have coined Huber. Basically,
Speaker 1: this guy was ignored and the alta interpretation continued with
Speaker 1: papers in you know his reason it's a nineteen seventy
Speaker 1: nine and nineteen eighty three, continuing this threat of interpretation,
Speaker 1: I think it is worth stepping back to just appreciate
Speaker 1: again the physical form of this thing we're talking about.
Speaker 1: The fossil records indicate that whatever this was, alga rotting
Speaker 1: conifer tree, or even fungus, it was huge. You know.
Speaker 1: I've seen estimates of a maximum known height of six
Speaker 1: or even eight meters like twice need to twenty five ft,
Speaker 1: So you've got a giant six m high stock of
Speaker 1: whatever it was. So something that was alive at a
Speaker 1: time when we have no evidence that any vertebrates had
Speaker 1: yet left the water, there were no trees or anything
Speaker 1: like that. Yeah, it's it's kind of like it's like
Speaker 1: a tree. It's not a tree, Yeah, it's a it's
Speaker 1: a it's a weird column of life that exists before
Speaker 1: there should be anything like a column. Yeah, and you
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier, I think that this would have been at
Speaker 1: a time where this would have been, without question, the
Speaker 1: tallest living thing on land. No, no trees, nothing stood
Speaker 1: above it. And I'm trying to imagine the implications of
Speaker 1: that if we were to live in this world. Because
Speaker 1: here's one for you. When you think of the word nature,
Speaker 1: what's the first thing that pops into your head? My
Speaker 1: very person to person, maybe you're not like me, but
Speaker 1: I think most people, at least in tree filled ecoregions,
Speaker 1: think trees when they think nature. Yeah, Or you know,
Speaker 1: even if I you know, I really love the landscape
Speaker 1: of of say Arizona, which, of course and coke comes
Speaker 1: as a variety of different environments. But but even if
Speaker 1: you're thinking about the desert, you're probably thinking about cacti. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because like the tallest features in a landscape, I think
Speaker 1: naturally become definitive of that landscape force. When you think city,
Speaker 1: you think buildings when you think nature. Again, this might
Speaker 1: be different for people who live and say like treeless environments.
Speaker 1: Say if you live in a step or something. But
Speaker 1: if you live in an area with there are trees,
Speaker 1: the trees become synonymous with nature. They're the iconic life form.
Speaker 1: Like what is the lorax speak for? You know, the
Speaker 1: the The suggestion is that he speaks for nature, but
Speaker 1: he speaks for the trees. Because the trees are nature
Speaker 1: by being the tallest living objects on the ground, you
Speaker 1: in some sense assume them to be the icon of nature. Itself.
Speaker 1: So what is this thing? It's almost like you could
Speaker 1: imagine that if you were to walk around the landscape
Speaker 1: of this period where these things were dominant, maybe Early
Speaker 1: Devonian or whatever, this might be your idea of nature.
Speaker 1: These giant mounds of whatever they are. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: they were basically the floral lords of the earth. There
Speaker 1: was nothing else to rival them. So I think we
Speaker 1: should explore more the continuing scientific debate about what the
Speaker 1: prototaxids is. But before that, let's take a break and
Speaker 1: then we come back. We can delve into mushroom theory.
Speaker 1: Thank alright, we're back. So we've been talking about these
Speaker 1: fossil organisms from hundreds of millions of years ago, known
Speaker 1: as prototaxids, these giant pillars that used to be by
Speaker 1: far the tallest thing on land. And there's been this
Speaker 1: great debate about what these fossils were when they were alive.
Speaker 1: Was it the trunk of a rotting conifer tree that
Speaker 1: was full of, you know, fungal fibers. Was it a
Speaker 1: giant alga or was it in fact a fungus And
Speaker 1: now we're going to get into the details of the
Speaker 1: fungus theory. Yeah, despite the conifer versus allergy past for
Speaker 1: prototax i t s. The most popular hypothesis at the moment, uh,
Speaker 1: seems to be the fungus hypothesis. Uh. Not to say
Speaker 1: they are not criticisms or questions regarding the fungus hypothesis,
Speaker 1: but it does seem to be the most popular interpretation.
Speaker 1: A giant six meter tall pillar of fungus right now.
Speaker 1: I do think it is important to note that we
Speaker 1: are not saying giant mushroom per se, because that brings
Speaker 1: to mind a certain image like Shitaki's shape, Right, yeah,
Speaker 1: sort of a super Mario Brothers kind of world or
Speaker 1: um or something that you would see on a on
Speaker 1: a black light fantasy painting in a room. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: we're no nobody is interpreting this is is having looked
Speaker 1: like a straight up um uh you know, cliche mushroom
Speaker 1: with an airbrush fairy sitting on top of it. Right.
Speaker 1: But but basically the fungus into pradition comes comes down
Speaker 1: to the organism's internal structure. It's composed of interwoven tubes
Speaker 1: just five to fifty microns across, and this would indicate
Speaker 1: not a plant but a fun guy alike in or
Speaker 1: perhaps even an algae. UH. You know, some of this
Speaker 1: points in that direction here as well. But on this
Speaker 1: issue I want to turn back to Huber again because
Speaker 1: this is what he has to say about the algae
Speaker 1: interpretation and ultimately UH the move towards the fungal interpretation. Quote.
Speaker 1: In my opinion, prototaxid S does not have the structural
Speaker 1: anatomy nor morphology of an alga. Chemo taxonomic analysis by
Speaker 1: Nicholas concluded that the chemical constituents found in prototax it
Speaker 1: certain fatty acids quton and subarin, differed from modern algae,
Speaker 1: but did not preclude an algial affinity. Lack of evidence
Speaker 1: of lignified supporting structures in the otherwise weak tissues UH
Speaker 1: and presumed erect habit would have imposed considerable stress in
Speaker 1: a terrestrial habitat. The Presence of the compounds associated with
Speaker 1: a terrestrial habitat raised the possibility that the genus could
Speaker 1: survive on land, but did not prevent reiteration that the
Speaker 1: algal affinity was still possible. The anatomy, morphology, and occurrences
Speaker 1: cannot be refuted so easily. He also points to UH
Speaker 1: ninety six transmission electron microscope findings from Rudolph Schmidt Uh
Speaker 1: and this was a paper titled Septal Pores and Prototaxi
Speaker 1: s an Enigmatic Devonian plant uh. In this he reveals
Speaker 1: that sceptal pores are are found here, suggesting fungal affinity.
Speaker 1: Septal pores are specialized dividing walls between cells, septa found
Speaker 1: in almost all species of fungi in the phylum Bassidi
Speaker 1: of my cotta. He points out that the inherent size
Speaker 1: of Prototaxi tas has long been a barrier to some
Speaker 1: when it comes to accepting fungal affinity, and he counters
Speaker 1: this by pointing out that we have you have various
Speaker 1: examples of of of quite large contemporary fungi and extensive
Speaker 1: my silian networks. He poses that perhaps prototaxites itself had
Speaker 1: a vast underground my silia network as well, but we
Speaker 1: just don't have fossil evidence of that mysilia network. But
Speaker 1: the possible picture here is is fascinating an underground kingdom
Speaker 1: of prototaxids erecting enormous fruiting bodies high into the air
Speaker 1: to send its spores on the breeze, spreading its kingdom
Speaker 1: even wider, which causes me to have deeper thoughts about
Speaker 1: the role of fungus in the evolution of land creatures
Speaker 1: and land ecosystems. Yeah, this is the kind of of
Speaker 1: of of mental image that the real hardcore fungus fans
Speaker 1: I think I could really get behind. This is like,
Speaker 1: this is a pulse statements during right here, I've got
Speaker 1: a question here. You ever ever wonder why we live
Speaker 1: on land and not underwater? Um less wet. I mean
Speaker 1: maybe it seems like a stupid question, but you know
Speaker 1: I stand by that, Like, why why is it do
Speaker 1: we live in this evolutionary context land based ecosystems rather
Speaker 1: than under the water, where we our ancestors came from,
Speaker 1: where we very well could have remained. Uh. If you
Speaker 1: picture life on Earth in the Cambrian period about five
Speaker 1: million years ago, peek under the surface of the water
Speaker 1: and you would find lots of life. Oceans swarming with
Speaker 1: strange armies of scuttling, undulating, bilaterally symmetrical animals, billions of
Speaker 1: trial bytes. You've got, you know, these extinct bottom dwelling
Speaker 1: animals shaped kind of like death metal. Really Pulley's many
Speaker 1: legged proto arthropods with hardened plates of armor on their backs,
Speaker 1: but also all these other organisms like the low blegged
Speaker 1: spiked worm that we call Hallucigenia we've talked about that
Speaker 1: show before, a group of creatures called Opabinia, which are
Speaker 1: swimming arthropods with five eyes and a single long hose
Speaker 1: like probosis tentacle reaching out the front of the head.
Speaker 1: It was also the time when complex predator prey relationships
Speaker 1: probably first evolved, with predators, possibly including the huge creature
Speaker 1: called Anomala caress. And it was a time of geologically
Speaker 1: rapid evolution and diversification of marine animal body forms and
Speaker 1: survival strategies. If you look in the period just before
Speaker 1: the Cambrian period, which is known as the edi acron period,
Speaker 1: there you don't find any of this stuff. You find,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe little indications of soft bodied worms, but
Speaker 1: like where are all these animals? And then of course
Speaker 1: they didn't occur in an instant but on a geological
Speaker 1: time scale, all these different animal body forms, with all
Speaker 1: this morphological diversity, it all happens pretty rapidly. But of
Speaker 1: course it has long been the case that we understood
Speaker 1: all this was taking place under the water in the oceans,
Speaker 1: that was simply where the life was back then. Uh, Like,
Speaker 1: we know from the fossil record that if you go
Speaker 1: back far enough, almost all archaic life on Earth lived
Speaker 1: in the oceans and the Precambrian world. It seems the
Speaker 1: difference between ocean and land was like the difference between
Speaker 1: a lush forest and a lifeless desert. In order to
Speaker 1: survive on land, an animal would have to find a
Speaker 1: way to tolerate dryness, of course, I mean, that's a
Speaker 1: big one, but as well as other threats. You know,
Speaker 1: direct exposure to radiation from a star, which we now
Speaker 1: know as sunlight seems nice to us, but if you're
Speaker 1: not used to it, it's probably pretty bad because it
Speaker 1: contains potentially deadly UV radiation UM and then perhaps most
Speaker 1: dawning of all, this would be a barren landscape and
Speaker 1: environment impoverished of chemical nutrition. Where do you get your
Speaker 1: nutrition and food from? If you decide to go live
Speaker 1: up on the land, the land is dry, devoid, sun blasted,
Speaker 1: plateau of death. I think from like a you know,
Speaker 1: Cambrian type period, you could think of land as being
Speaker 1: like mar ers. You know, like what could live there,
Speaker 1: what could live there at the time is probably limited
Speaker 1: to the kinds of things we imagine possibly living on
Speaker 1: Mars if there is any life on Mars, right, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe like microscopic bacterial type organisms. So how did our rich,
Speaker 1: modern world of plants and animals and everything else come about?
Speaker 1: What did it take to turn these lifeless protrusions of
Speaker 1: rocky crust into living, breathing ecosystems. It appears, especially after
Speaker 1: some research in the past few years, that the answer
Speaker 1: might well be little tiny sprigs of fungus. That is
Speaker 1: what it took to make the land livable. Uh. So
Speaker 1: let's back up a few years. I wanted to mention
Speaker 1: that I was reading a twenty sixteen Scientific American article
Speaker 1: about research postulating that the first Earth organism to take
Speaker 1: up life on land was actually a fungus. Now, there
Speaker 1: have been some development since then, but this was back
Speaker 1: in uh. This was a now extinct fungal organism called
Speaker 1: Torto tubas u, and I was immediately thinking, I want
Speaker 1: a T shirt for my neighbor Torto tubas uh. This
Speaker 1: is based on research published in twenty sixteen and the
Speaker 1: Botanical Journal of the Lane and Society, based on physical evidence,
Speaker 1: including samples from Libya and Chad that were four hundred
Speaker 1: and forty to four hundred and forty five million years old,
Speaker 1: and this again would have been a time when the
Speaker 1: land was basically barren. But these fossils contained evidence of
Speaker 1: microscopic filaments of fungus that are normally used to leach
Speaker 1: chemical nutrients from soil. But this would have been at
Speaker 1: a time when there was essentially nothing else that we
Speaker 1: know of living on the land. So what did this
Speaker 1: have to do with us. Well, land ecosystems, of course
Speaker 1: depend on soil. Right soil is the life Plants need
Speaker 1: nutrient rich top soil in order to thrive, and animals
Speaker 1: need plants in order to thrive. So where did the
Speaker 1: soil to support the evolution of land to plants come from.
Speaker 1: Perhaps it came from early land colonizing fungus like Torto tubas,
Speaker 1: according to a paleontologist, Martin Smith of Durham University in Britain,
Speaker 1: he was at Cambridge when he did this research, and
Speaker 1: he's quoted in this article quote. By building up deeper, richer,
Speaker 1: more stable soils, Torto tubas would have paved the way
Speaker 1: for larger, more complex green plants to quite literally take root,
Speaker 1: in turn providing a food source for animals and allowing
Speaker 1: the escalation of terrestrial ecosystems. So the idea here is
Speaker 1: the fungus is the foothold. It's what creates the opportunity
Speaker 1: for land to be colonized by life forms evolved from
Speaker 1: the marine life forms below. I like that the fungus
Speaker 1: is the foothold. Another for you, right uh, And then
Speaker 1: also featured in the same article as Smith says, quote,
Speaker 1: by the time torto tubas went extinct, the first trees
Speaker 1: and forests had come into existence. This humble, subterranean and
Speaker 1: fungus steadfastly performed it's rotting and recycling service for some
Speaker 1: seventy million years as life on land transformed from simple,
Speaker 1: crusty green films to a rich ecosystem that wouldn't look
Speaker 1: out of place in a tropical greenhouse today. So you
Speaker 1: go from almost mars to you know, forests and plants,
Speaker 1: and it's fungus like this towrto tubus that probably helped
Speaker 1: make the soil to allow that to happen, right because
Speaker 1: because otherwise to your point, like, it's the difference between
Speaker 1: the rich complex and perhaps in many cases overwhelming life
Speaker 1: beneath the waters and the desert of of the surface,
Speaker 1: and the desert might be a fine If you can
Speaker 1: flop out there, that might be a good way to
Speaker 1: get out of the competition for life and of course
Speaker 1: all that death it's going on below. Then yeah, there's
Speaker 1: nothing to eat your you're you're out there away from
Speaker 1: all your food sources. You're gonna have to flop back down.
Speaker 1: But eventually, with time you reach the point where there
Speaker 1: there is food up here, there is the foothold is there,
Speaker 1: there is there is now a a new domain to
Speaker 1: colonize and conquer. Right uh So about towards the tubas specifically,
Speaker 1: I want to say that did it have a mushroom?
Speaker 1: Did have a fruiting body like a like a mushroom
Speaker 1: cap that we know of. At the time this article
Speaker 1: is published, there was not evidence of whether this fungus
Speaker 1: produced a fruiting body like a mushroom. So, so if
Speaker 1: you make you t shirt, I don't know if you
Speaker 1: can righteously depict the mushroom form for towards the tubas.
Speaker 1: I don't know. It's maybe got to be like a
Speaker 1: little microscopic filament. But anyway, so early fungus that colonized
Speaker 1: land was actually able to mine lifeless rocks and minerals
Speaker 1: for some nutrients, and that's also pretty amazing, right. Uh.
Speaker 1: Generally you need to get your nutrients from other life forms,
Speaker 1: and of course fungus does decompose other life forms, like
Speaker 1: fungus helps the rot and recycling process we were just
Speaker 1: talking about, but it can also extract some nutrients just
Speaker 1: from the mineral crust of the earth, and using that
Speaker 1: process can help turn lifeless top soil into something more
Speaker 1: like the rich stuff you think of in your garden today.
Speaker 1: But it doesn't stop there, of course. Once early land
Speaker 1: plants like liver warts often thought to be one of
Speaker 1: the you know, earliest forms of land plants, once they
Speaker 1: come on the scene, plants and fungi also form you know,
Speaker 1: complex symbiotic relationships with one another. They in different ways,
Speaker 1: benefit from each other's presence. I was reading a piece
Speaker 1: about ah it was based on a CBC documentary about
Speaker 1: prehistoric fungus, and there was a quote from an associate
Speaker 1: professor of Plants soil Interactions at the University of Leeds
Speaker 1: named Katie Field, and she said, ultimately quote fungi helped
Speaker 1: plants move away from being these marginal, tiny little things
Speaker 1: on the water's edge into large forests and entire ecosystems.
Speaker 1: So the fungi paved the way for plants to move
Speaker 1: away from the water's edge and colonize the contents. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like these these essentially become the small scale forests in
Speaker 1: which the Devonian animals would live things that were essentially
Speaker 1: like like millipedes and centipedes and uh, you know, early
Speaker 1: things like mites and so forth, like, you know, a
Speaker 1: very small scale life. But they need an environment, they
Speaker 1: need a place to conduct their business and need things
Speaker 1: to eat. And this was this was their jungle. Yes,
Speaker 1: another really interesting point brought to my attention by the
Speaker 1: same CBC piece, Uh that I've never read about this before,
Speaker 1: But this is about the role of prehistoric fungus in
Speaker 1: shaping the evolution and eventual trophic dominance of the mammals
Speaker 1: that became our direct ancestors. Without fungus, we almost certainly
Speaker 1: wouldn't exist in multiple ways. And here's another one of
Speaker 1: those ways. All right, So I think about the Katie
Speaker 1: extinction event. We've discussed it many times on the show. Uh,
Speaker 1: it's the the event that killed the dinosaurs, the non
Speaker 1: avian dinosaurs, the dinosaurs that did not become modern day
Speaker 1: words died in this event. About sixty five to sixty
Speaker 1: six million years ago, there was a great and sudden
Speaker 1: dying of many life forms, maybe something like sevent of
Speaker 1: all life on Earth when extinct. I think about eight
Speaker 1: percent of animal species disappeared. Many scientists think this was
Speaker 1: probably mostly due to an enormous impact from space, So
Speaker 1: there's still some disagreement about the relative role of other
Speaker 1: things like volcanic eruptions and other factors. But the impact hypothesis,
Speaker 1: which is the most common, most important factor that's attributed
Speaker 1: these days. It states that a giant comet or asteroid
Speaker 1: at orbital speed struck the Earth in an area that
Speaker 1: is now the cheek Shulu Crater in the Yucatan Peninsula.
Speaker 1: And this impact, of course, it kicked up stuff. It
Speaker 1: kicked up an unbelievable amount of dust and particulate matter,
Speaker 1: which clouded the atmosphere and blocked sunlight, possibly for months
Speaker 1: at a time, which would kill off a huge amount
Speaker 1: of Earth's plant life, which of course needs sunlight to survive.
Speaker 1: You cut off the sunlight, the plants die, right. This is,
Speaker 1: of course the same concept that is employed in the
Speaker 1: concept of nuclear winter, in which a nuclear war would
Speaker 1: send up enough material the smoke of of fire storms,
Speaker 1: burning cities, burning forests, uh, sending all that stuff up
Speaker 1: into the atmosphere and creating a kind of sarcophagus on
Speaker 1: the Earth, preventing as much sunlight from reaching the Earth
Speaker 1: yes surface, yeah, yeah, similar concepts so uh. Of course,
Speaker 1: the most direct problem with this is it would disrupt
Speaker 1: the food chain at its source. Right. The food chain
Speaker 1: is typically based on photosynthetic organisms that make their bodies
Speaker 1: by using sunlight. They die without the sunlight, and then
Speaker 1: with them dead, what can all the animals and other
Speaker 1: things eat. So so it's going to kill things all
Speaker 1: throughout the food chain through resource deficiency. But there's enough
Speaker 1: other thing here that is worth considering, which is the
Speaker 1: role of fungus. So a blotted sky would lead to
Speaker 1: an Earth just covered in dead, decaying plant matter. Uh.
Speaker 1: And again the sky is dark, so this is almost
Speaker 1: a perfect condition for fungi to thrive. Think of Earth
Speaker 1: after the Katie impact as mold world. It's mold planet.
Speaker 1: Maybe not literally mold, but you know, the probably mold.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I didn't look into it. It's fungus um.
Speaker 1: So it would be boom time for fungus, and it
Speaker 1: would represent a threat to surviving animals which could succumb
Speaker 1: to fungal infections in a world where fungus is all
Speaker 1: over the place and thriving, and suddenly, in this context,
Speaker 1: in a world where for hundreds of millions of years,
Speaker 1: the dominant animals have been reptile formed, our tiny mammalian
Speaker 1: ancestors would quite suddenly have a powerful survival advantage over reptiles.
Speaker 1: Being warm blooded. In fact, it seems that one of
Speaker 1: the pressures driving the evolution of warm bloodedness is the
Speaker 1: threat of infection by fungus. Like your warm body, your
Speaker 1: dog's warm body, the warm bodies of the rats under
Speaker 1: the floorboards are in part machines for fighting parasitic infections
Speaker 1: by fungus. To quote Arturo Casadival, a professor of public
Speaker 1: health at Johns Hopkins University, uh quote, the reptiles are
Speaker 1: quite susceptible to fungal diseases. But your typical mammal, which
Speaker 1: maintains a temperature in the mid thirties or so, and
Speaker 1: I guess they'd be celsius, not fahrenheit, creates a thermal
Speaker 1: exclusionary zone for fungi. Thus, mammals, being warm blooded, gave
Speaker 1: them a foothold to become more successful and dominant across
Speaker 1: multiple ecosystems during this time of doom and rot for
Speaker 1: the cold blooded kingdom of reptiles. I think that's fascinating.
Speaker 1: Tens of millions of years before the discovery of penicillin killer,
Speaker 1: fungus was all already offering us a leg up by
Speaker 1: having shaped our evolution in such a way that we resist.
Speaker 1: You know, our ancestors resisted it, and the reptiles could
Speaker 1: not as easily resisted, thus making helping mammals become more dominant.
Speaker 1: And just one more thing on this subject of general
Speaker 1: prehistoric fungus. So there was a twenty nineteen study I
Speaker 1: was looking at the chase land based fungus development even
Speaker 1: farther back into prehistory, so we would already uh, we
Speaker 1: had already seen evidence that the first living organisms to
Speaker 1: UH to colonize, to fully colonize the land where probably
Speaker 1: these little fungal organisms. There was a paper published in
Speaker 1: Nature in twenty nineteen by Lauren at All called early
Speaker 1: Fungi from the Proterozoic era in Arctic Canada, and there
Speaker 1: was an excellent article about this research in the New
Speaker 1: York Times by former Stuff to Blow your Mind guest
Speaker 1: Carl Zimmer, I recommend checking that out. It's called a
Speaker 1: billion year old fungus may hold clues to life survival
Speaker 1: on land. But the short version is that in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: the group of researchers they published findings of fossil remains
Speaker 1: of an ancient fungus which they named Rasafirah Giraldi. And
Speaker 1: this fungus is apparently about a billion years old, roughly
Speaker 1: like six hundred million years older than the previous last
Speaker 1: common ancestor of all fungus had been thought to emerge.
Speaker 1: And if this is correct, it would definitely mean that
Speaker 1: fungi were colonizing land on their own before plants, before
Speaker 1: anything else that we know of lived on land except
Speaker 1: maybe some bacteria. Uh. If so, what were they eating?
Speaker 1: Possibly bacteria, we don't know for sure. So basically zimmer
Speaker 1: saying that we are stardust, we are golden, we are
Speaker 1: billion year old fungi. I don't think there's a suggestion
Speaker 1: that the fungus is an ancestor of ours, but it
Speaker 1: is it suggested that this fungus probably played an important
Speaker 1: role in shaping the ecosystems that allowed our direct ancestors
Speaker 1: to survive. So we are not of Zugdamoin, but we
Speaker 1: are at least unwitting u. We're in the dead of Subtomo. Yeah, alright,
Speaker 1: on that note, we're gonna take one more break, but
Speaker 1: when we come back, we will return, specifically to interpretations
Speaker 1: of prototax It s thank alright, We're back. Alright. So
Speaker 1: we were discussing the proposal that the prototaxites fossils were
Speaker 1: actually gigantic stalks of fungus. Uh. Not a rotting conifer
Speaker 1: tree with fungus in it, not a giant alga, but
Speaker 1: just a huge piece of fungus, a tree sized piece
Speaker 1: of fungus. What is the evidence for this, Well, there
Speaker 1: was some There's been more and more evidence supporting the
Speaker 1: fungal hypothesis in the recent decades. Uh. To read a
Speaker 1: quote from an article I was reading about this in
Speaker 1: New Scientists from see Kevin Boyce, a geophysicist to the
Speaker 1: University of Chicago. Quote. No matter what argument you put forth,
Speaker 1: people say it's crazy. A six meter fungus doesn't make
Speaker 1: any sense. But here's the fossil. Uh. And so why
Speaker 1: does boys? Why is boys so confident that it is
Speaker 1: a fungus? Well Voice was involved in research that attempted
Speaker 1: to look for clues to the classification of prototaxides fossils
Speaker 1: by analyzing different levels of trace carbon compounds within them.
Speaker 1: I thought this was really interesting. Now, note that this
Speaker 1: is not carbon dating. These fossils are far too old
Speaker 1: to be subject to accurate carbon dating methods, and they're
Speaker 1: not They're not trying to establish dates for them. But
Speaker 1: it does follow some similar principles to what's done in
Speaker 1: radiocarbon dating, which is looking at different isotopes of the
Speaker 1: element carbon within the object, and in so in carbon dating,
Speaker 1: these isotopes I think are usually carbon twelve and carbon fourteen.
Speaker 1: In the research on prototaxides it was carbon twelve and
Speaker 1: carbon thirteen, and basically the reasoning went like this, Plants
Speaker 1: get essentially all of their carbon content from the two
Speaker 1: in the air. Again one of my favorite facts about nature.
Speaker 1: It's so counterintuitive. Plants make their bodies out of C
Speaker 1: O two that they absorbed from the atmosphere using energy
Speaker 1: acquired from sunlight to do the chemical work. But the
Speaker 1: atoms that make up the carbon content of plants, that's
Speaker 1: from the air. When you think about it, next time
Speaker 1: you burn charcoal, you're burning carbon that was once the
Speaker 1: body of a plant that was made out of gas
Speaker 1: from the air. I don't think I'll ever get over them.
Speaker 1: I mean, it always seems like the natural thing to
Speaker 1: assume is that the matter that makes up a plant
Speaker 1: comes up out of the ground. Uh. And I think,
Speaker 1: you know, some small content like minerals and trace elements
Speaker 1: and stuff like that might be absorbed through the water,
Speaker 1: of course, absorbed through the roots. But yeah, the carbon
Speaker 1: content comes from the C O two in the air. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: And so for this reason, of course, because plants make
Speaker 1: their make their you know, the carbon in their bodies
Speaker 1: out of the air. The ratios of different carbon isotopes
Speaker 1: found in plants or fairly predictable for plants that were
Speaker 1: alive at the same time. It's based on the ratios
Speaker 1: of carbon isotopes found in the atmosphere, But the ratios
Speaker 1: of carbon twelve and carbon thirteen found in fungus are
Speaker 1: not always so predictable, since, like us, they get the
Speaker 1: carbon content of their bodies from food rather than from
Speaker 1: the air, and that food could potentially include a number
Speaker 1: of sources producing wacky isotope ratios between carbon twelve and
Speaker 1: carbon thirteen, And what the researchers found was that in fact,
Speaker 1: the carbon twelve to carbon thirteen levels in these prototaxites
Speaker 1: fossils were not consistent, suggesting that they are that they
Speaker 1: were not plants, that the carbon in them was coming
Speaker 1: from somewhere other than the air, and thus that they
Speaker 1: were less likely to be plants more likely to be
Speaker 1: something that was making their bodies out of food that
Speaker 1: they ate, which would include fungus. Another quote from Voice
Speaker 1: in that New Scientist article quote, a six M fungus
Speaker 1: would be odd enough in the modern in the world,
Speaker 1: but at least where used to trees quite a bit
Speaker 1: bigger plants at that time, where a few feet tall.
Speaker 1: Invertebrate animals were small, and there were no terrestrial vertebrates,
Speaker 1: this fossil would have been all the more striking in
Speaker 1: such a diminutive landscape, again, standing up above anything else
Speaker 1: that would have been around. Yeah, it just would have
Speaker 1: yet dwarfed everything else. So based on what I've read,
Speaker 1: I think I'm fairly convinced by the fungal hypothesis that
Speaker 1: this was a giant six meter twenty foot tall piece
Speaker 1: of fungus. Yeah, and I like the idea that is
Speaker 1: often presented to that it it would have need it
Speaker 1: would have needed to to grow that high so as
Speaker 1: to help spread the spores, like you have a tangible
Speaker 1: reason for achieving that height. I don't know, is there
Speaker 1: a reason in the in the algae theory about why
Speaker 1: a giant alga would need to be that tall? Is
Speaker 1: it not that it's not tall, that they were supposed
Speaker 1: to be horizontal or something. Um, you do see the
Speaker 1: horizontal aspect of that brought up at times, So that's
Speaker 1: that's certainly seems to be a possibility. But we'll get
Speaker 1: into another horizontal theory here in a minute. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: you know, as we mentioned earlier, that algo hypothesis has
Speaker 1: never completely gone away. In one of the more interesting
Speaker 1: angles on it is that um prototax i t S
Speaker 1: might have been a composite organism arising from algae living
Speaker 1: among fungal filaments. This is of course nothing completely alien
Speaker 1: because we have these today, we have lichen so and
Speaker 1: this would have been essentially a parasitic or symbiotic relationship
Speaker 1: between the the alergaye and the fungus but it would
Speaker 1: have essentially been a giant lichen. Then now another tantalizing
Speaker 1: theory relates to liver warts, which we mentioned are already
Speaker 1: is being a you know, primitive form of of plant life,
Speaker 1: kind of kind of like like moss prototerrestrial plants. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so it's been suggested that instead of these things
Speaker 1: being um vertical pillars, instead of being this phallic landscape
Speaker 1: um that is that is so hauntingly depicted in some
Speaker 1: of these instances of paleo art detailing prototax it s,
Speaker 1: what have instead? Uh, yeah, they were just rolled up
Speaker 1: carpets of liver warts. Now let me read a description here.
Speaker 1: This was from a This was discussed in a two
Speaker 1: thousand ten American Journal of Botany paper by Graham at All,
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna read just a quote from it here. Quote.
Speaker 1: Our comparative analyzes in instead indicated that prototax it is
Speaker 1: formed from partially degraded wind gravity or water rolled mats
Speaker 1: of mixo tropic liver warts having fungal and santo bacterial associates,
Speaker 1: much like the modern liver wart genius Um marchantia. We
Speaker 1: proposed that the fossil body is largely derived from abundant,
Speaker 1: highly degradation resistant tubular right zoids of marcantioid liver warts
Speaker 1: intermixed with tubular microbial elements. So I know that's that
Speaker 1: sounds like a bit much, but basically the idea here
Speaker 1: is um imagine, AstroTurf has been laid out across the
Speaker 1: Devonian landscape, and then the wind starts, a blowing wind
Speaker 1: or gravity or water, right, all three of these things
Speaker 1: begins to roll the AstroTurf back up like wrestling maps. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like wrestling mats, rolling them up into these big tubes.
Speaker 1: Then uh, these big rolls of AstroTurf, and those big
Speaker 1: rolls of AstroTurf just set there and then eventually, you know, fossilized.
Speaker 1: Like basically, that's the idea, except instead of it being AstroTurf,
Speaker 1: it is the liver warts that have grown across the
Speaker 1: surface of the planet. Now, yeah, this is okay. I
Speaker 1: won't deny it just because it's less exciting than the
Speaker 1: giant alerts the fungus. In a sense, it's less exciting. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's certainly less exciting, but I would argue that it
Speaker 1: is equally weird. It is. It is also just like
Speaker 1: a weird idea of the landscape, like a landscape that
Speaker 1: looks like they're just a bunch of rolled up old
Speaker 1: carpets made out of green slime. That's that's strange. Uh.
Speaker 1: And apparently this is not you know, apparently some commentators
Speaker 1: have some issues with this particular theory. It's not I
Speaker 1: don't think it's widely accepted, but it is still such
Speaker 1: a strange idea. I can't help but but find it,
Speaker 1: you know, weirdly amusing. There was actually amused by it.
Speaker 1: There was actually a bit of art with this study.
Speaker 1: It's worth looking up if you can find it. And
Speaker 1: it's yeah, it's just bizarre. It's like this bright green
Speaker 1: landscape and then they're all these just rolls of moss
Speaker 1: carpet out there, just laying around like somebody left them,
Speaker 1: as if the god this came to install vegetation on
Speaker 1: the earth and simply got bored or went off for
Speaker 1: a smoke break and just left everything half finished. Uh. Now,
Speaker 1: one last question I thought we should look at is obviously,
Speaker 1: you know, there are no tree sized columns of fungus
Speaker 1: or whatever they were today, So something happened to the
Speaker 1: prototaxids to drive them extinct. Any idea what that might be,
Speaker 1: I think we don't know for sure, but Huber has
Speaker 1: suggested something the same researcher you were pointing to earlier.
Speaker 1: Huber has suggested that actually the prototaxity suffered parasitic infestations
Speaker 1: from recently evolved insects. Remember this, this would be also
Speaker 1: a time when the land is being colonized by various
Speaker 1: forms of invertebrates, and these land dwelling arthropods would dig
Speaker 1: little holes into the stalks of prototaxids. You can apparently
Speaker 1: see evidence of these probable insect bore holes in the
Speaker 1: fossil remains of prototaxids today, and these might have played
Speaker 1: some role in driving the giant fungus extinct. Again, it
Speaker 1: comes back to the idea that the fungal world essentially,
Speaker 1: you know, drives out into the wilderness and remakes it
Speaker 1: into something that's habitable. But then come the new inhabitants,
Speaker 1: and then come the inheritors of the earth, and the
Speaker 1: inheritors generally do not treat those that came before them.
Speaker 1: So well. So true, but of course the fungus never
Speaker 1: really goes away, right, It just kind of goes underground
Speaker 1: and it is true. I think we do have to
Speaker 1: remind us, like we can get so obsessed with species
Speaker 1: that we we forget sort of like the broader view
Speaker 1: of life itself, you know. So, yes, it's not like
Speaker 1: it's not like the day the fungus died. It's not
Speaker 1: like the day that the fungal legions lost. No, they
Speaker 1: continued and continue to thrive on the planet. But they
Speaker 1: thrive where they where there is a niche for them
Speaker 1: to occupy. They fit right in there. Sometimes there's a shroom,
Speaker 1: sometimes there's a shroom. He's this shroom for his particular
Speaker 1: time and place. Absolutely, so there you have it. Prototax
Speaker 1: i t s. Obviously, this is a topic where you know,
Speaker 1: hopefully there'll be more studies in the future that will
Speaker 1: shed more light on this fossil mystery. Uh, this mystery fossil.
Speaker 1: But but hopefully we we were we did a good
Speaker 1: job here about just you know, introducing you to its world,
Speaker 1: to its strange world. We are not done with prehistoric fungus.
Speaker 1: I'm sure there will be more to come back to
Speaker 1: in the future. Yes, praise zug Moy, we probably will.
Speaker 1: Speaking of zug Moy, the the demon queen of fungus
Speaker 1: from Dungeons and Dragons in the under Dark. In Dungeons
Speaker 1: and Dragons, they have a particular um like tree sized
Speaker 1: mushroom that everybody like makes at least the would substitute
Speaker 1: for the underdark called zirkle would. So I can't help.
Speaker 1: But since um an affinity here between zirkle would and
Speaker 1: uh pro otex it t s uh, it seems it
Speaker 1: seemed like basically the same concept. Well, let's hope insects
Speaker 1: don't don't start boring holes in the under dark. Yeah. Also,
Speaker 1: I'm not completely sure you would be able to build
Speaker 1: a log cabin out of prototax it t s. But
Speaker 1: but Hubert does mention a particular species of large mushroom
Speaker 1: that that was traditionally carved into some sort of shape
Speaker 1: by native peoples of North America. I believe. Huh. You know,
Speaker 1: one thing, one question I didn't find the answer to
Speaker 1: yet maybe it's out there, is how hard would this
Speaker 1: thing have been? Yeah? I mean could you, yeah, like,
Speaker 1: could you carve it into boards and make lumber out
Speaker 1: of it? Or would it have been relatively soft and
Speaker 1: easy to knock over with a good shove. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I guess Luckily there there there aren't gonna be any
Speaker 1: large animals that are gonna come and push you over.
Speaker 1: It's gonna it's gonna come down to kind of like
Speaker 1: we're talking with the Roles, It's going to be going
Speaker 1: to come down to wind and water and gravity, and
Speaker 1: and these things are inevitably going to fall over. They
Speaker 1: did fall over. That's the that's how they're preserved as fossils,
Speaker 1: horizontally and not vertically. Um, in the same way that
Speaker 1: that our tallest and most impressive trees today will inevitably
Speaker 1: at some point fall over and become horizontal. Um. But
Speaker 1: but yeah, I think it comes back to what you
Speaker 1: said to about like this being kind of the sticking
Speaker 1: point sometimes for people with the vertical fungal interpretation. People
Speaker 1: just say, well, how could that be? How could these
Speaker 1: things have existed, how could they have stood? How could
Speaker 1: they have grown like this? Uh? And again it just
Speaker 1: comes back to the intriguing nature of it as well.
Speaker 1: It would it was just such an alien world and
Speaker 1: this was the largest alien on the landscape. Does it
Speaker 1: for me? All right? Uh? In the meantime, if you
Speaker 1: want to check out other episodes of stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind, you know where they are there over stuff
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Speaker 1: and just make sure that you subscribe so you'll always
Speaker 1: get new episodes and rate interview that that really helps
Speaker 1: us out in the long term. Huge thanks as always
Speaker 1: to our excellent audio producer Seth Nicholas Johnson. If you
Speaker 1: would like to get in touch with us with feedback
Speaker 1: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 1: for the future, just to say hello, you can email
Speaker 1: us at contact at stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.
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