Canadian Arctic fossils are oldest known fungus on Earth
Source: The Guardian
Canadian Arctic fossils are oldest known fungus on Earth
Fungus is half a billion years older than previous record holder found in Wisconsin
Ian Sample Science editor
Wed 22 May 2019 18.00 BST Last modified on Wed 22 May 2019 19.30 BST
Tiny fossils found in mudrock in the barren wilderness of the Canadian Arctic are the remains of the oldest known fungus on Earth, scientists say.
The minuscule organisms were discovered in shallow water shale, a kind of fine-grained sedimentary rock, in a region south of Victoria island on the edge of the Arctic Ocean.
Tests on the shale, which accumulated over millions of years in a river or lake, revealed that it formed between 900m and 1bn years ago in what is now the Northwest Territories.
The age of the rock makes the fungus half a billion years older than the previous record holder, a 450m-year-old fungus that was unearthed in Wisconsin.
Writing in the journal Nature, scientists describe how a battery of chemical and structural analyses identified the ancient organism as Ourasphaira giraldae. Spores of the fungus are less than a tenth of a millimetre long and connect to one another by slender, branching filaments.
-snip-
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/may/22/canadian-arctic-fossils-are-oldest-known-fungus-on-earth
______________________________________________________________________
Related: Early fungi from the Proterozoic era in Arctic Canada (Nature)
= new reply since forum marked as read
