Long Before Trees Overtook the Land, Earth Was Covered by Giant Mushrooms
July 17, 2013 3:14 pm
Long Before Trees Overtook the Land, Earth Was Covered by Giant Mushrooms
Digging up a Prototaxites fossil. Photo: University of Chicago
From around 420 to 350 million years ago, when land plants were still the relatively new kids on the evolutionary block and “the tallest trees stood just a few feet high,” giant spires of life poked from the Earth. “The ancient organism boasted trunks up to 24 feet (8 meters) high and as wide as three feet (one meter),” said National Geographic in 2007. With the help of a fossil dug up in Saudi Arabia scientists finally figured out what the giant creature was: a fungus. (We think.)
The towering fungus spires would have stood out against a landscape scarce of such giants, said New Scientist in 2007.
“A 6-metre fungus would be odd enough in the modern world, but at least we are used to trees quite a bit bigger,” says Boyce. “Plants at that time were a few feet tall, invertebrate animals were small, and there were no terrestrial vertebrates. This fossil would have been all the more striking in such a diminutive landscape.”
Fossils of the organisms, known as Prototaxites, had peppered the paleontological findings of the past century and a half, ever since they were first discovered by a Canadian in 1859. But despite the fossil records, no one could figure out what the heck these giant spires were. The University of Chicago:
For the next 130 years, debate raged. Some scientists called Prototaxites a lichen, others a fungus, and still others clung to the notion that it was some kind of tree. “The problem is that when you look up close at the anatomy, it’s evocative of a lot of different things, but it’s diagnostic of nothing,” says Boyce, an associate professor in geophysical sciences and the Committee on Evolutionary Biology. “And it’s so damn big that when whenever someone says it’ssomething, everyone else’s hackles get up: ‘How could you have a lichen 20 feet tall?’”
That all changed in 2007 when a study came out that concluded the spires were a fungus, like a gigantic early mushroom.
But not everyone was sold on the idea that Prototaxites was an early fungus...
Read more: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/smartnews/2013/07/long-before-trees-overtook-the-land-earth-was-covered-by-giant-mushrooms/#ixzz2jza2aue9
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Or, how about a horror flick title, The Fungus Among Us, with the requisite clueless teenager who goes out alone at night with a faulty flashlight. The script writes itself.
Allman Brothers, too
Oh,..."I've got a brain in a jar!"
As a fungus, it's not photosynthesising, so it doesn't have to get above competing organisms, like trees do. It's consuming dead material down at ground level. Why invest so much energy to produce something that tall?
the stems and caps we call 'mushrooms' are merely the fruit put out by much larger web-thread organisms...
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungus#Morphology
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We wouldn't need umbrellas, then, would we?
...Classic.
and have been around just as long. I doubt they were unimportant ecological actors. The question is whether they were able to efficiently decompose the various structural polymers that plants were evolving over that time (lignins, cellulose, etc.). In addition to their roles as decomposers, fungi are quite good at parasitism and symbiosis.
I'm not 100% convinced that Prototaxites is a fungus, but it's at least a possibility.
As a mycologist I would like to think that my favorite group of organisms dominated the land in pre-historic times. 
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Looks like the Japanese did their research.
And all this time we just thought they got high! 
Look. Giant ravenous plants & even dinosaurs!
John Lucas