Speaker 1: The time traveler, for so it will be convenient to
Speaker 1: speak of him. Turned his attention at last the Devonian period.
Speaker 1: His pale gray eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually
Speaker 1: pale face became flushed and animated. The calm of mourning
Speaker 1: was upon. The world whirled in its greening, the spring
Speaker 1: time of the Earth. The environment was arid and warm,
Speaker 1: and everywhere I walked I observed forests of moss and
Speaker 1: clusters of shrub like ferns, and horse tails. Amid them
Speaker 1: crept primitive arthropods and something that looked remarkably like a
Speaker 1: winged insect, though I did not catch it in the
Speaker 1: act of flight. But there were no leaves, no true
Speaker 1: trees to lift a canopy above my head. For what
Speaker 1: I at first took for primitive conifers proved anything. But
Speaker 1: each of these cylindrical giants stood some twenty feet high
Speaker 1: and were a good yard wide. They towered above the
Speaker 1: Devonian world like stylight pillars, and I observed just a
Speaker 1: hint of spores carried away from their czaar. I wondered, then,
Speaker 1: might these organisms to be giant mushrooms? But that's when
Speaker 1: the more locks came at me. The more Locks, I said,
Speaker 1: surely the more locks existed far in the future. What
Speaker 1: were they doing in the Devonian? Well, they stole my
Speaker 1: time machine and they followed me. But you arrived there
Speaker 1: 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 Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
Speaker 1: I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. 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 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 imagining what it might be like to
Speaker 1: walk amid this strange, these strange h specimens, this 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 even,
Speaker 1: and that is proto tax I t s. Yes, today
Speaker 1: we are going to be talking about the world of
Speaker 1: prehistoric fungus. This is something that I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about for a long time because fungus in the fossil record.
Speaker 1: I think there's actually a lot of interesting stuff we explore.
Speaker 1: But the keystone of today's episode is going to be, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the fossil remains of these giant stylite organisms from hundreds
Speaker 1: of millions of years ago that were the tallest standing
Speaker 1: things of their time, and we don't know for sure
Speaker 1: what they were. We have we have better ideas than
Speaker 1: we used to, and we'll get into that as the
Speaker 1: episode goes on. But yeah, try to imagine yourself as
Speaker 1: a paleontologist digging into the strata from a period hundreds
Speaker 1: of millions of years ago where there were no trees,
Speaker 1: there's no there are no forests on the earth, but
Speaker 1: you find these six meter high giant pillars of something
Speaker 1: that was alive. Yeah. And you can see if you
Speaker 1: look up the images of prototyps I t s, you'll
Speaker 1: you'll see people posing with the fossil remnants. Uh. And
Speaker 1: it looks like like a massive pillar or even in
Speaker 1: the way it's broken in some of these uh, these fossils,
Speaker 1: it looks like it could be the you know, the
Speaker 1: neckbone of some of some enormous creature. Like there's an
Speaker 1: enormity to the fossil uh that that makes it so irresistible.
Speaker 1: It is a giant of the past, but it is not.
Speaker 1: It is not an animal. It is it is something else.
Speaker 1: We don't know exactly what prototax it t S looked
Speaker 1: like when it was alive. They are different interpretations of it,
Speaker 1: but some of the interpretations uh and and 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 tantalized fossil then continues to be something of
Speaker 1: a mystery fossil. So to to get to the origin
Speaker 1: of the fossil find itself, we have to go back
Speaker 1: roughly a hundred and seventy six years, and that is
Speaker 1: when in eighteen forty three, Canadian born geologist William Edmund
Speaker 1: Logan unearthed fossil remnants of Devonian flora. And the classification
Speaker 1: of the Devonian period, by the way, only dates back
Speaker 1: to the eighteen thirties, so it was, you know, kind
Speaker 1: 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 Devonian rock on the shores of
Speaker 1: the I believe it's gossip a Bay in Quebec, in
Speaker 1: particularly an area that is called seal Cove, which he
Speaker 1: was mapping for coal and other minerals. Well, this fits
Speaker 1: in with a great Canadian tradition of of awesome fossil
Speaker 1: sites being discovered in you know, not originally by paleontologists,
Speaker 1: but by people developing industry and heavy heavy transport and
Speaker 1: stuff like. I think about how the the shale beds
Speaker 1: like the Burgess Shale in the Canadian Rockies were originally
Speaker 1: found because railroad workers who were building railroads through the area.
Speaker 1: We're finding the stone bugs everywhere, and that eventually attracted
Speaker 1: the attention of paleontologists to come and investigate. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: the world of trilobytes, right, and other creatures of course,
Speaker 1: which we'll get back to later. So I want to
Speaker 1: note that one of one of my key sources on
Speaker 1: the the the early history of this fossil find uh
Speaker 1: comes to us from paleo biologist Francis Huber of the
Speaker 1: National Museum of Natural History and Washington, d C. Who
Speaker 1: wrote a two thousand and one piece titled Rotted Wood
Speaker 1: Alga 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 in full, but uh,
Speaker 1: fair enough citation and uh in miscitation and the illegitimate
Speaker 1: renaming of things is a vital part of this fossil's
Speaker 1: human history. Yeah, well, you know, you've got to get
Speaker 1: people to agree on what they call things, or it's
Speaker 1: gonna be a lot harder to talk about them, and
Speaker 1: it can come become quite a dramatic issue as well.
Speaker 1: Unravel here. So, in eighteen fifty five, Logan's Devonian Flora
Speaker 1: fossils passed into the hands of noted Canadian geologist John
Speaker 1: William Dawson, who, by the way, the mineral Dawsonite is
Speaker 1: named in his honor. He was particularly taken by a
Speaker 1: large specimen with the with the peculiar interior structure. It
Speaker 1: resembled a large tree, but under a microscope, it became
Speaker 1: clear that the fossilized tissue was uh solicified, you know,
Speaker 1: containing an entangled mesh that resembled fungal my cilia. He
Speaker 1: even noted the mysilia resemblance himself in his writings, but
Speaker 1: he didn't really explore it further. Uh, I mean, he
Speaker 1: did not explore the explore the fungal angle further, but
Speaker 1: he was very interested this fossil. He traveled to seal
Speaker 1: Cove himself and obtained additional samples. Okay, so they've found
Speaker 1: this giant fossilized trunk of something. It looks like it
Speaker 1: could be the trunk of a tree, but examining it
Speaker 1: on a microscopic level, it looks more like the texture
Speaker 1: of fungus than it does the texture of plant matter. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: particularly my cilia. And now now my cilium is the
Speaker 1: vegetative part of a fungus. Just reminded everybody. It's a
Speaker 1: It's a mass of branching vein like hi fe that
Speaker 1: you'll find underground or in whatever The mushroom or the
Speaker 1: fruiting body is emerging from the mushroom itself is a
Speaker 1: death emergence. Life is actually thriving beneath the surface, the
Speaker 1: mushroom comes up to to release spores. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: reproductive organ Yeah. Now, the way Dawson interpreted this, this uh,
Speaker 1: this fossil was Okay, we have something that looks like
Speaker 1: like fungus. So what we have here is probably a
Speaker 1: rotting conifer tree, you know, an early conifer tree. It's rotting,
Speaker 1: it's decomposing. So I'm seeing the decomposer fungus within the
Speaker 1: decomposing uh specimen, all of this preserved in a single
Speaker 1: fossil specimen. Well, that would make sense. It's it is
Speaker 1: a tree trunk, it's infested with fungal Mysilia type structures, right,
Speaker 1: And so he gave it the name proto tax I
Speaker 1: t s or essentially, first you referring to the U
Speaker 1: family Texas Cia, so the U tree right. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: so the the actual name is is referring to a
Speaker 1: conifer resemblance. So he puts these eyes ideas out there,
Speaker 1: and then, um, you know, quite as a surprise to Dawson,
Speaker 1: a Scottish botanist by the name of William C. Carruthers
Speaker 1: proposed a different interpretation. Uh. He said, well, this is
Speaker 1: perhaps the fossil remains of a very large algae aquatic
Speaker 1: or perhaps terrestrial in nature. Algae, of course, can grow
Speaker 1: in weird places like on ice and snow. So he
Speaker 1: declared a new name. He said, Nope, we're not going
Speaker 1: to call this proto tax i t s. We're gonna
Speaker 1: call this nemato ficus. Okay, but wait a minute, an
Speaker 1: algae that like a giant fossilized algae the size of
Speaker 1: a tree trunk. Yeah, I mean that's creepy. Well. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One of the things, and this is pointed out by
Speaker 1: others that have studied, is like there's basically no non
Speaker 1: weird explanation for this fossil. We'll get to several comments
Speaker 1: like that later. Yeah, there's no like normal way of
Speaker 1: looking at it. Now. Here's here's the thing about Carruthers
Speaker 1: coming along and saying, no, this is Nemo Nemato fight.
Speaker 1: First of all, there are rules with the naming of things,
Speaker 1: even at the time, so you're not allowed to just
Speaker 1: come and give it a new name. That it's an
Speaker 1: illegitimate renaming. So so that alone is kind of weird
Speaker 1: and and rude. But then also, according to Huber, Carruthers
Speaker 1: was just scathing and very personal in his criticism quote
Speaker 1: scathing and slanderous. Uh in terms of criticizing Dawson, and
Speaker 1: it seemed to have like really caught Dawson off guard. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, based on these descriptions, one is tempted. I
Speaker 1: don't do not know much about William C. Caruthers, but
Speaker 1: but just based on Huber's writing, one is tempted debut
Speaker 1: Caruthers is something of a bully in his field while
Speaker 1: also being an extremely respected botanist. But then again, perhaps
Speaker 1: our our our vision of this rivalry is incomplete. Well,
Speaker 1: if that interpretation is correct, he would not be the
Speaker 1: only legitimately good scientist who also is lacking in manners
Speaker 1: and or another so um. According to Hubert, Dawson fought
Speaker 1: for his initial classification, but but then later he ends
Speaker 1: up rejecting it, apparently even trying to make it seem
Speaker 1: as as if he never connected the fossil to conifers
Speaker 1: at all. And then he himself, in his eight book
Speaker 1: The Geological History of Plants illegitimately used the name nomato
Speaker 1: ficus instead of proto taxi t s uh. So. I
Speaker 1: imagine that at least of the time that Huber was
Speaker 1: writing in like two thousand one. You don't do this.
Speaker 1: You don't just like switch the name to something else
Speaker 1: without a I don't know. I'd imagine a lot of
Speaker 1: fields have like an international naming committee that if there
Speaker 1: is going to be a name change, would have to
Speaker 1: agree on it or something. Yeah, I mean it's it's
Speaker 1: why for instance, Uh, like one's fossil that we've discussed
Speaker 1: on the on the show before U basil Osaurus. Okay, uh,
Speaker 1: I hear saw us in there. That means lizard, it
Speaker 1: means king lizard. But it was not we know now
Speaker 1: it was not a lizard at all. It was a mammal.
Speaker 1: But we we we don't go back and change the
Speaker 1: name in this case. So it's a similar case here.
Speaker 1: The name prototax I t stuck and did stick despite
Speaker 1: carruthers uh notion that we should switch to a different name.
Speaker 1: And that name also Prototaxids is still used today but
Speaker 1: names aside. So Carruthers is pushing this interpretation. Okay, this
Speaker 1: is not a rotting conifer tree that's full of kind
Speaker 1: of fungal infestation. This is a giant alga. So what
Speaker 1: happens with this interpretation, Well, this becomes the dominant interpretation
Speaker 1: for a while, and it basically goes unquestioned until nineteen
Speaker 1: nineteen when one A. H. 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 to Huber. Basically,
Speaker 1: this guy was ignored and the alta interpretation continued with
Speaker 1: papers and you know it's it's reacent. It's say nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy nine and ninety 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 twenty to twenty five ft.
Speaker 1: So you've got a giant six m high stalk 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, h It's it's a
Speaker 1: it's a weird column of life that exists before there
Speaker 1: should be anything like a column. Yeah, and you mentioned earlier,
Speaker 1: I think that this would have been at a time
Speaker 1: where this would have been, without question, the tallest living
Speaker 1: thing on land. No, no trees, nothing's to it, above it.
Speaker 1: And I'm trying to imagine the implications of that if
Speaker 1: we were to live in this world. Because here's one
Speaker 1: for you. When you think of the word nature, what's
Speaker 1: the first thing that pops into your head? Might very
Speaker 1: person to person. Maybe you're not like me, but I
Speaker 1: think most people, at least in tree filled ecoregions, think
Speaker 1: trees when they think nature. Yeah, Or you know, even
Speaker 1: if I you know, I really love the landscape of
Speaker 1: of say Arizona, which, of course and Coke comes as
Speaker 1: a variety of different environments. But but even if you're
Speaker 1: 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
Speaker 1: nature itself. So what is this thing? It's almost like
Speaker 1: you could imagine that if you were to walk around
Speaker 1: the landscape of this period where these things were dominant,
Speaker 1: maybe Early Devonian or whatever, this might be your idea
Speaker 1: of nature. These giant mounds of whatever they are. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean they were basically the floral lords of the earth.
Speaker 1: There was nothing else to rival them. So I think
Speaker 1: we should explore more the continuing scientific debate about what
Speaker 1: the prototaxites is. But before that, let's take a break
Speaker 1: and then we come back. We can delve into mushroom theory.
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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 prototax id s, these giant pillars that used to
Speaker 1: be by far the tallest thing on land. And there's
Speaker 1: been this great debate about what these fossils were when
Speaker 1: they were alive. Was it the trunk of a rotting
Speaker 1: conifer tree that was full of, you know, fungal fibers.
Speaker 1: Was it a giant alga or was it in fact
Speaker 1: a fungus And now we're going to get into the
Speaker 1: details of the fungus theory. Yeah, despite the conifer versus
Speaker 1: algy past, for prototax it t s the most popular
Speaker 1: hypothesis at the moment. Uh seems to be the fungus hypothesis. Uh.
Speaker 1: Not to say they are not criticisms or questions regarding
Speaker 1: the fungus hypothesis, but it does seem to be the
Speaker 1: most popular interpretation. Amazing a giant, six meter tall pillar
Speaker 1: of fungus right now. I do think it is important
Speaker 1: to note that we are not saying giant mushroom per se,
Speaker 1: because that brings to mind a certain image 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 ferry sitting on top of it. Right.
Speaker 1: But but basically the fungus interpretation comes comes down to
Speaker 1: the organism's internal structure. It's composed of interwoven tubes just
Speaker 1: five to fifty microns across, and this would indicate not
Speaker 1: a plant, but a fun guy, a likin, or perhaps
Speaker 1: even an algae. Uh. You know, some of this points
Speaker 1: in that direction here as well. But on this issue
Speaker 1: I want to turn back to Huber again because this
Speaker 1: is what he has to say about the algae interpretation
Speaker 1: and ultimately, uh, the the move towards the fungal interpretation quote.
Speaker 1: In my opinion, prototaxids does not have the structural anatomy
Speaker 1: nor morphology of an alga chemo Taxonomic analysis by Nicholas
Speaker 1: concluded that the chemical constituents found in prototax it certain
Speaker 1: fatty acids cuton and subarin differed from modern Alga, but
Speaker 1: did not preclude an algial affinity. Lack of evidence of
Speaker 1: lignified supporting structures in the otherwise weak tissues. Uh And
Speaker 1: presumed erect habit would have imposed considerable stress in a
Speaker 1: terrestrial habitat. The Presence of the compounds associated with a
Speaker 1: terrestrial habitat raised the possibility that the genus could survive
Speaker 1: on land, but did not prevent reiteration that the algial
Speaker 1: affinity was still possible. The anatomy morphology and a currences
Speaker 1: cannot be refuted so easily. He also points to UH
Speaker 1: nine six transmission electron microscope findings from Rudolph Schmidt uh And.
Speaker 1: This was a paper titled Septal Pores and prototax it
Speaker 1: t s an enigmatic Devonian plant. Uh In this he
Speaker 1: reveals 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 fung guy in the phylum
Speaker 1: Bassidi of my Cota. He points out that the inherent
Speaker 1: size of prototax it tes has long been a barrier
Speaker 1: to some when it comes to accepting fungal affinity, and
Speaker 1: he counters this by pointing out that we have various
Speaker 1: examples of of of quite large contemporary fungi uh and
Speaker 1: extensive my Silian networks. He poses that perhaps prototaxites itself
Speaker 1: had a vast underground Mysilian at work as well, but
Speaker 1: we just don't have fossil evidence of that Mysilia network.
Speaker 1: But the possible picture here is is fascinating an underground
Speaker 1: kingdom of prototaxids erecting enormous fruiting bodies high into the
Speaker 1: air to send its spores on the breeze, spreading its
Speaker 1: kingdom even wider, which causes me to have deeper thoughts
Speaker 1: about the role of fungus in the evolution of land
Speaker 1: creatures and land ecosystems. Yeah, this is the kind of
Speaker 1: of of of mental image that the real hardcore fungus
Speaker 1: fans I think I could really get behind. This is like,
Speaker 1: this is a pulse stainments dream 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 it,
Speaker 1: maybe it seems like a stupid question, but you know,
Speaker 1: I stand by that like, why why is it that
Speaker 1: we live in this evolutionary context land based ecosystems rather
Speaker 1: than under the water, where we are 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: trialo bites. You've got, you know, these extinct bottom dwelling
Speaker 1: animals shaped kind of like death metal roly 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 Ediacrian 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 like,
Speaker 1: where are all these animals? And then of course they
Speaker 1: didn't occur in an instant but on a geological time scale,
Speaker 1: all these different animal body forms, with all this morphological diversity,
Speaker 1: it all happens pretty rapidly. But of course it has
Speaker 1: long been the case that we understood all this was
Speaker 1: taking place under the water in the oceans. That was
Speaker 1: simply where the life was back then. Uh, Like, we
Speaker 1: know from the fossil record that if you go back
Speaker 1: far enough, almost all archaic life on Earth lived in
Speaker 1: the oceans and the Precambrian world. It seems the difference
Speaker 1: between ocean and land was like the difference between a
Speaker 1: lush forest and a lifeless desert. In order to survive
Speaker 1: on land, an animal would have to find a way
Speaker 1: to tolerate dryness. Of course, I mean, that's a big one,
Speaker 1: but as well as other threats, you know, direct exposure
Speaker 1: to radiation from a star which we now know as sunlight.
Speaker 1: Seems nice to us, but if you're not used to it,
Speaker 1: it's probably pretty bad because it contains potentially deadly UV
Speaker 1: radiation UM and then, perhaps most dawning of all, this
Speaker 1: would be a barren landscape and environment impoverished of chemical nutrition.
Speaker 1: Where do you get your nutrition and food from if
Speaker 1: you decide to go live up on the land, The
Speaker 1: land is dry, devoid, sun blasted plateau of death. I
Speaker 1: think from like a you know, Cambrian type period, you
Speaker 1: could think of land as being like Mars, you know,
Speaker 1: like what could live there? What could live there at
Speaker 1: the time is probably limited to the kinds of things
Speaker 1: we imagine possibly living on Mars, if there is any
Speaker 1: life on Mars, right, you know, maybe like microscopic, bacterial
Speaker 1: type organisms. So how did our rich, modern world of
Speaker 1: plants and animals and everything else come about? What did
Speaker 1: it take to turn these lifeless protrusions of rocky crust
Speaker 1: into living, breathing ecosystems. It appears, especially after some research
Speaker 1: in the past few years, that the answer might well
Speaker 1: be little tiny sprigs of fungus. That is what it
Speaker 1: took to make the land livable. Uh. So let's back
Speaker 1: up a few years. I wanted to mention that I
Speaker 1: was reading a twenty sixteen Scientific American article about research
Speaker 1: postulating that the first earth organism to take up life
Speaker 1: on land was actually a fungus. Now, there have been
Speaker 1: some development since then, but this was back in UH.
Speaker 1: This was a now extinct fungal organism called Torto tubas.
Speaker 1: And that was immediately thinking, I want a T shirt
Speaker 1: for my neighbor Torto tubas. Uh. But this is based
Speaker 1: on research published in twenty sixteen and the Botanical Journal
Speaker 1: of the Lenaean Society, based on physical evidence including samples
Speaker 1: from Libya and Chad that were four hundred and forty
Speaker 1: to four hundred and forty five million years old. And
Speaker 1: this again would have been a time when the land
Speaker 1: was basically barren. But these fossils contained evidence of microscopic
Speaker 1: filaments of fungus that are normally used to leach chemical
Speaker 1: nutrients from soil. But this would have been at a
Speaker 1: time when there was essentially nothing else that we know
Speaker 1: of living on the land. So what did this have
Speaker 1: to do with us. Well, land ecosystems, of course depend
Speaker 1: on soil, right soil is the life. Plants need nutrient
Speaker 1: rich top soil in order to thrive, and animals need
Speaker 1: plants in order to thrive. So where did the soil
Speaker 1: to support the evolution of land plants come from? Perhaps
Speaker 1: it came from early land colonizing fungus like torto tubus.
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 to to tubas would have paved the
Speaker 1: way for larger, more complex green plants to quite literally
Speaker 1: take root, in turn providing a food source for animals
Speaker 1: and allowing the escalation of terrestrial ecosystems. So the idea
Speaker 1: here is the fungus is the foothold. It's what creates
Speaker 1: the opportunity for land to be colonized by life forms
Speaker 1: evolved from the marine life forms below. I like that
Speaker 1: the fungus is the foothold, right uh And then also
Speaker 1: featured in the same article as Smith says quote, by
Speaker 1: the time toward a tubas wind extinct, the first trees
Speaker 1: and forests had come into existence. This humble subterranean fungus
Speaker 1: steadfastly performed it's rotting and recycling service for some seventy
Speaker 1: million years, as life on land transformed from simple, crusty
Speaker 1: green films to a rich ecosystem that wouldn't look out
Speaker 1: of place in a tropical greenhouse today. So you go
Speaker 1: from almost Mars to you know, forests and plants, and
Speaker 1: it's fungus like this towrto tubas that probably helped make
Speaker 1: the soil to allow that to happen, right because because
Speaker 1: otherwise to your point, like, it's the difference between the
Speaker 1: rich complex and perhaps in many cases overwhelming life beneath
Speaker 1: the waters and the desert of of the surface, and
Speaker 1: the desert might be a fine if you can flop
Speaker 1: out there, that might be a good way to get
Speaker 1: out of that, the competition for life and of course
Speaker 1: all that death that'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: to 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, the not evidence of whether this fungus produced
Speaker 1: a fruiting body like a mushroom. So, so if you
Speaker 1: make you t shirt, I don't know if you can
Speaker 1: righteously depict the mushroom form for tord the tubis. I
Speaker 1: don't know. It's maybe got to be like a little
Speaker 1: microscopic filament. But anyway, so early fungus that colonized land
Speaker 1: was actually able to mine lifeless rocks and minerals for
Speaker 1: some nutrients. And that's also pretty amazing. Right. Generally you
Speaker 1: need to get your nutrients from other life forms, and
Speaker 1: of course fungus does decompose other life forms, like fungus
Speaker 1: helps the rot and recycling process we were just talking about,
Speaker 1: but it can also extract some nutrients just from the
Speaker 1: mineral crust of the earth, and using that process can
Speaker 1: help turn lifeless top soil into something more like the
Speaker 1: rich stuff you think of in your garden today. But
Speaker 1: it doesn't stop there, of course. Once early land plants
Speaker 1: like liver warts often thought to be one of the
Speaker 1: you know, earliest forms of land plants, once they come
Speaker 1: on the scene. And 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 a it was based on the 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 continents. 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, very
Speaker 1: small scale life. But they need an environment, they need
Speaker 1: a place to conduct their business. They need things to eat,
Speaker 1: and this was this was their jungle. Yes, another really
Speaker 1: interesting point brought to my attention by the same CBC piece,
Speaker 1: uh that I'd never read about this before. But this
Speaker 1: is about the role of prehistoric fungus in shaping the
Speaker 1: evolution and eventual trophic dominance of the mammals that became
Speaker 1: our direct ancestors. Without fungus, we almost certainly wouldn't exist
Speaker 1: in multiple ways. And here's another one of those ways.
Speaker 1: Al Right, So think about the Katie extinction event. We've
Speaker 1: discussed it many times on the show. Uh. It's the
Speaker 1: the event that killed the dinosaurs, the non avian dinosaurs,
Speaker 1: the dinosaurs that did not become modern day birds died
Speaker 1: in this event about sixty five to sixty six million
Speaker 1: years ago. There was a great and sudden dying of
Speaker 1: many life forms, maybe something like seventy of all life
Speaker 1: on Earth when extinct. I think about eighty percent of
Speaker 1: animal species disappeared. Many scientists think this was probably mostly
Speaker 1: due to and a nor mist 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 Shulub 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 you know, the smoke of of
Speaker 1: fire storms, burning cities, burning forests, uh, sending all that
Speaker 1: stuff up into the atmosphere and creating a kind of
Speaker 1: sarcophagus on the Earth, preventing as much sunlight from reaching
Speaker 1: the Earth yes surface, Yeah, yeah, similar concepts so uh.
Speaker 1: Of course, the most direct problem with this is it
Speaker 1: would disrupt the food chain at its source, right. The
Speaker 1: food chain is typically based on photosynthetic organisms that make
Speaker 1: their bodies by using sunlight. They die without the sunlight,
Speaker 1: and then with them dead, what can all the animals
Speaker 1: and other things eat. So so it's going to kill
Speaker 1: things all throughout the food chain through resource deficiency. But
Speaker 1: there's another thing here that is worth considering, which is
Speaker 1: the role of fungus. So a blotted sky would lead
Speaker 1: to 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 after
Speaker 1: the Katie impact as mold world. It's mold planet. Maybe
Speaker 1: not literally mold, but you know, the probably mold. I
Speaker 1: 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. And I think that's fascinating.
Speaker 1: Tens of millions of years before the discovery of penicillin killer,
Speaker 1: fungus was already offering us a leg up by having
Speaker 1: 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 that
Speaker 1: was again that 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: this group of researchers they published findings of fossil remains
Speaker 1: of an ancient fungus which they named Orasafirah 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 him
Speaker 1: or And if this is correct, it would definitely mean
Speaker 1: that fungi were colonizing land on their own before plants,
Speaker 1: before anything else that we know of lived on land
Speaker 1: except maybe some bacteria. Uh. If so, what were they eating?
Speaker 1: Possibly bacteria, we don't know for sure. So basically, Zimmer's
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 zugdomoy, but we
Speaker 1: are at least unwitting of sutomot. Yeah. Alright, on that note,
Speaker 1: we're going to take one more break, but when we
Speaker 1: come back, we will return, specifically to interpretations of prototax
Speaker 1: It sank alright, We're back, alright. So we were discussed saying, uh,
Speaker 1: the proposal that the Prototaxites fossils were actually gigantic stalks
Speaker 1: of fungus. Uh. Not a rotting conifer tree with fungus
Speaker 1: in it, Not a giant alga, but just a huge
Speaker 1: piece of fungus, a tree sized piece of fungus. What
Speaker 1: is the evidence for this? Well, there was some. There's
Speaker 1: been more and more evidence supporting the fungal hypothesis in
Speaker 1: the recent decades. Uh. Uh. To read a quote from
Speaker 1: an article I was reading about this in New Scientists
Speaker 1: from see Kevin Boyce, a geophysicist at the University of
Speaker 1: Chicago quote. No matter what argument you put forth, people
Speaker 1: say it's crazy. A six meter fungus doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: But here's the fossil. Uh. And so why does boys?
Speaker 1: Why is boys so confident that it is a fungus? Well,
Speaker 1: voice was involved in research that attempted to look for
Speaker 1: clues to the classification of prototaxites fossils by analyzing different
Speaker 1: levels of trace carbon compounds within them. I thought this
Speaker 1: was really interesting. Now, note that this is not carbon dating.
Speaker 1: These fossils are far too old to be subject to
Speaker 1: accurate carbon dating methods, and they're not they're not trying
Speaker 1: to establish dates for them. But it does follow some
Speaker 1: similar principles to what's done in radiocarbon dating, which is
Speaker 1: looking at different isotopes of the element carbon within the object,
Speaker 1: and so in carbon dating, these isotopes I think are
Speaker 1: usually carbon twelve and carbon fourteen. In the research on prototaxids,
Speaker 1: it was carbon twelve and carbon thirteen, and basically the
Speaker 1: reasoning went like this, Plants get essentially all of their
Speaker 1: carbon content from the CEO two in the air. Again
Speaker 1: one of my favorite facts about nature. It's so counterintuitive.
Speaker 1: Plants make their bodies out of c O two that
Speaker 1: they absorb from the atmosphere using energy acquired from sunlight
Speaker 1: to do the chemical work. But the atoms that make
Speaker 1: up the carbon content of plants, that's from the air.
Speaker 1: When you think about it, next time you burn charcoal,
Speaker 1: you're burning carbon that was once the body of a
Speaker 1: plant that was made out of gas from the air.
Speaker 1: I don't think I'll ever get over them. I mean,
Speaker 1: it always seems like the natural thing to assume is
Speaker 1: that the matter that makes up a plant comes up
Speaker 1: out of the ground. Uh. And I think you know,
Speaker 1: some small content like minerals and trace elements and stuff
Speaker 1: like that might be absorbed through the water, of course,
Speaker 1: absorbed through the roots. But yeah, the carbon content comes
Speaker 1: 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 are 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 meter fungus
Speaker 1: would be odd enough in the modern world, but at
Speaker 1: least where used to tree is quite a bit bigger plants.
Speaker 1: At that time where a few feet tall invertebrate animals
Speaker 1: were small, and there were no terrestrial vertebrates, this fossil
Speaker 1: would have been all the more striking in such a
Speaker 1: dominion of landscape, again, standing up above anything else that
Speaker 1: would have been around it. It just would have dwarfed
Speaker 1: everything else. So, based on what I've read, I think
Speaker 1: I'm fairly convinced by the fungal hypothesis that this was
Speaker 1: a giant six meter twenty foot tall piece of fungus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I like the idea that is often presented to
Speaker 1: that it it would have need. It would have needed
Speaker 1: to to grow that high so as to help spread
Speaker 1: the spores. Like you have a tangible reason for achieving
Speaker 1: that height. I don't. Is there a reason in the
Speaker 1: in the algae theory about why a giant alga would
Speaker 1: need to be that tall? Is it not that it's
Speaker 1: not tall, that they were supposed to be horizontal or something? Um,
Speaker 1: you do see the horizontal aspect of that brought up
Speaker 1: at times. So that's that's certainly seems to be a possibility.
Speaker 1: But we'll get into another horizontal theory here in a minute. Um. Now,
Speaker 1: you know, as we mentioned earlier, that algae 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 comple positive organism arising from algae
Speaker 1: living among fungal filaments. This is of course nothing completely
Speaker 1: alien because we have these today, we have lichen so
Speaker 1: and this would have been essentially a parasitic or symbiotic
Speaker 1: relationship between the the algae and the fungus. But it
Speaker 1: would have essentially been a giant lichen. Then. Now, another
Speaker 1: tantalizing theory relates to liver warts, which we mentioned are
Speaker 1: already is being a you know, primitive form of of
Speaker 1: plant life, 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 uh that is so hauntingly depicted in
Speaker 1: some of these instances of paleo art detailing prototax it
Speaker 1: t s would have instead. Uh yeah, they were just
Speaker 1: rolled up carpets of liver warts. Now let me read
Speaker 1: a description here. This was from a This was discussed
Speaker 1: in a two thousand ten American Journal of Botany paper
Speaker 1: by Graham at All, and I'm gonna read just a
Speaker 1: quote from it here. Quote. Our comparative analyzes in instead
Speaker 1: indicate that prototaxidy's formed from partially degraded wind, gravity, or
Speaker 1: water rolled mats of mixo tropic liver wards having fungal
Speaker 1: and santo bacterial associates, much like the modern liver wart
Speaker 1: genius um marchantia. We proposed that the fossil body is
Speaker 1: largely derived from abundant, highly degradation resistant tubular rhizoids of
Speaker 1: marcantioid liver wards intermixed with tubular microbial elements. So, uh,
Speaker 1: I know that's that sounds like a bit much, But
Speaker 1: basically the idea here is um imagine AstroTurf has been
Speaker 1: laid out um across the Devonian landscape. Then the wind
Speaker 1: starts a blowing wind or gravity or water, right, all
Speaker 1: three of these things begins to roll the the AstroTurf
Speaker 1: back up like wrestling maps. Yeah, like wrestling. Pat's rolling
Speaker 1: them up into these big tubes. Then uh, these big
Speaker 1: rolls of AstroTurf, and those big rolls of AstroTurf just
Speaker 1: set there and then eventually you know, fossilized. Like basically,
Speaker 1: that's the idea, except instead of it being AstroTurf, it
Speaker 1: is the liver warts that have grown across the surface
Speaker 1: of the planet. Now, yeah, this is okay. I won't
Speaker 1: deny it just because it's less exciting than the giant
Speaker 1: pillars of 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 also just like a weird
Speaker 1: idea of the landscape, but like a landscape that looks
Speaker 1: like they're just a bunch of rolled up old carpets
Speaker 1: made out of green slime. That's that's strange. Uh. And
Speaker 1: apparently this is not you know, apparently some uh 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 aged to be
Speaker 1: amused by it. There was actually a bit of art
Speaker 1: with this study. It's worth looking up if you can
Speaker 1: find it. And it's yeah, it's just bizarre. It's like
Speaker 1: this bright green landscape and then they're all these just
Speaker 1: rolls of moss carpet out there, just laying around like
Speaker 1: somebody left them, as if the gods came to install
Speaker 1: vegetation on the earth and simply got bored or went
Speaker 1: off for a smoke break and just left everything half finished. 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 prototaxids
Speaker 1: 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 would be also a
Speaker 1: time when the land is being colonized by various forms
Speaker 1: of invertebrates, and these land dwelling arthropods would dig little
Speaker 1: holes into the stalks of prototaxids. You can apparently see
Speaker 1: evidence of these probable insect bore holes in the fossil
Speaker 1: remains of prototaxids today, and these might have played some
Speaker 1: role in driving the giant fungus extinct. Again, it comes
Speaker 1: back to the idea that the fungal world essentially, you know,
Speaker 1: drives out into the wilderness and remakes it into something
Speaker 1: that's habitable. But then come the new inhabitants, and then
Speaker 1: come the inheritors of the earth, and the inheritors only
Speaker 1: do not treat those that came before them. So well,
Speaker 1: so true, but of course the fungus never really goes away, right,
Speaker 1: It just kind of goes underground. And it is true.
Speaker 1: I think we do have to remind us, like we
Speaker 1: can get so obsessed with species that we we forget
Speaker 1: sort of like the broader view of life itself, you know. So, yes,
Speaker 1: it's not like it's not like the day the fungus died.
Speaker 1: It's not like the day that the fungal legions lost. No,
Speaker 1: they continued and continue to thrive on the planet. But
Speaker 1: they they thrive where they where, where there is a
Speaker 1: niche for them to occupy, they fit right in there.
Speaker 1: Sometimes there's a shroom. Sometimes there's a shroom. He's this
Speaker 1: shroom for his particular time and place. Absolutely, So there
Speaker 1: you have it. Prototax I t s. Obviously this is
Speaker 1: a topic where, you know, hopefully they'll be more studies
Speaker 1: in the future that will shed more light on this
Speaker 1: fossil mystery. Uh, this mystery fossil. But uh, but hopefully
Speaker 1: we we were we did a good job here about
Speaker 1: just you know, introducing you to its world, to its
Speaker 1: strange world. We are not done with prehistoric fungus. I'm
Speaker 1: sure there will be more to come back to in
Speaker 1: the future. Yes, praise Zugmoy, we probably will. Speaking of
Speaker 1: zug Mooy, the demon queen of fungus from Dungeons and
Speaker 1: Dragons in the under Dark. In Dungeons and Dragons, they
Speaker 1: have a particular um like tree sized mushroom that everybody
Speaker 1: like makes it would substitute for the under dark, called
Speaker 1: zirkle would. So I can't help. But since um an
Speaker 1: affinity here between zirkle would and uh prototax it s uh,
Speaker 1: it seems it seems like basically the same concept. Well,
Speaker 1: let's hope insects don't don't start boring holes in the
Speaker 1: under dark. Yeah. Also, I'm not completely sure you would
Speaker 1: be able to build a log cabin out of prototax
Speaker 1: it t s. But but Hubert does mention a particular
Speaker 1: species of of large mushroom that that was traditionally carved
Speaker 1: into some sort of shape by native peoples of North America.
Speaker 1: I believe. Huh uh. You know. One thing, one question
Speaker 1: I didn't find the answer to yet maybe it's out there,
Speaker 1: is how hard would this thing have been? Yeah? I
Speaker 1: mean could you, yeah, like, could you carve it into
Speaker 1: boards and make lumber out of it? Or would it
Speaker 1: have been relatively soft and easy to knock over with
Speaker 1: a good shove. Yeah, I mean I guess luckily there
Speaker 1: there there aren't gonna be any large animals that are
Speaker 1: gonna come and push you over. It's gonna it's gonna
Speaker 1: come down to uh kind of like we're talking with
Speaker 1: the roles. It's going to be going to come down
Speaker 1: to wind and water and gravity and and these things
Speaker 1: are inevitably going to fall over. They did fall over.
Speaker 1: That's the That's how they are preserved as fossils horizontally
Speaker 1: and not vertically um in the same way that that
Speaker 1: are tallest and most impressive trees today will inevitably at
Speaker 1: some point fall over and become horizontal. Um. But but yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it comes back to what he said to
Speaker 1: about like this being kind of the sticking point sometimes
Speaker 1: for people with the vertical fungal interpretation. People just say, well,
Speaker 1: how could that be? How could these things have existed,
Speaker 1: how could they have stood? How could they have grown
Speaker 1: like this? Uh? And again it just comes back to
Speaker 1: the intriguing nature of it as well. It would it
Speaker 1: was just such an alien world and this was the
Speaker 1: largest alien on the landscape. That does her for me,
Speaker 1: all right. Uh. In the meantime, if you want to
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