My guess is that it’s a relative of red algae and plants/Viridiplantae, but not quite either.
At least one source mentions it produces lignin or something similar; lignin is present in both clades I mentioned. However since it doesn’t do photosynthesis we can rule out belonging to those clades, I genuinely don’t think evolution would favour ditching phycoerythrin or chlorophyll, so odds are it never developed either.
Wiki has a breakdown of the debate and how it’s evolved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototaxites
Neat stuff
This has absolutely blown my mind!
This looks exactly like the kind of whose ancestors would, over millions of years, eventually mutate to become a tree.
The polished fossil in the Wikipedia article looks a shocking amount like wood!
there were “trees” before actual trees evolved. in the carbiniferous, mostly from lycophytes,
One of the linked papers thinks it’s actually horizontal rather vertical, as people have guessed originally.
But new research from the University of Edinburgh and National Museums Scotland has shown the fossil is neither fungus nor plant, but a new lifeform that became extinct around 370 million years ago.
Sandy Hetherington, the lead co-author and research associate at National Museums Scotland, said: “They are life, but not as we now know it, displaying anatomical and chemical characteristics distinct from fungal or plant life, and therefore belonging to an entirely extinct evolutionary branch of life.”
It’s life Jim, but not as we know it
There’s Klingons on the starboard bow
Starboard bow, Jim!
an entirely extinct evolutionary branch of life
Pardon my ignorance, I seem to have misunderstood the meaning of “extinct” (?).
It’s a fossil. Really should be part of the headline.
Oooh, okay yeah.
Man, what I wouldn’t give to time travel back millions of years and just have a glance through the window of a pod, to see what it would be like to live here for a day back then.
‘They are life’ wtf? LoL
…because it’s multiple lifeforms making a single structure. The plural is correct.
Sounds kinda like coral
About 7,9248 m (decimal comma)
Decimal commas are a lie to cover up that they found Yggdrasil
Spooky phallus.
That doesn’t narrow it down.
@Innerworld “Sandy Hetherington, the lead co-author and research associate at National Museums Scotland, said: “They are life, but not as we now know it”
