-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: April 23, 2007 8:55:24 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: The "Humongous Fungus" -- Bush Family Missing Link?
Mysterious Prehistoric Organism Identified
By Charles Q. Choi
http://news.aol.com/topnews/articles/_a/mysterious-prehistoric-
organism/20070423182709990001?ncid=NWS00010000000001
"It's hard to imagine [a 20-foot-tall fungus] surviving in the
modern world."
- researcher C. Kevin Boyce
(April 23) - A giant mystery organism more than 350 million years
old has finally been identified as a humongous fungus.
The enigma known as Prototaxites, which stood in branchless, tree-
like trunks up to more than 20 feet tall and a yard wide, lived
worldwide from roughly 420 million to 350 million years ago. The
giant was the largest-known organism of its day, living in a time
when wingless insects, millipedes, worms and other creepy-crawlies
dominated, as backboned animals had not yet evolved out of the oceans.
"That world was a very strange place," said researcher C. Kevin
Boyce, a University of Chicago paleobotanist.
Prototaxites has generated controversy for more than a century.
Originally classified as a conifer like a pine tree, scientists
later argued that it was instead a lichen, various types of algae
or a fungus .
"No matter what argument you put forth, people say, well, that’s
crazy. That doesn’t make any sense," Boyce said. "A 20-foot-tall
fungus doesn’t make any sense. Neither does a 20-foot-tall algae
make any sense, but here’s the fossil."
Strange world
Simple vascular plants, the ancestors of the familiar conifers,
ferns and flowering plants of today, had established themselves on
land 40 million years before the appearance of Prototaxites, but
the tallest among them stood no more than a couple feet high.
"Initially, they’re just stems," Boyce said. "They don’t have
roots. They don’t have leaves. They don’t have anything like that."
On the inside, Prototaxites is clearly not a plant, composed as it
is of interwoven tubes just five to 50 microns across (50 microns
is about half the width of a human hair).
"With that anatomy, it suggests lichens, fungi or algae," Boyce
told LiveScience.
Paleobiologist Francis Hueber of the National Museum of Natural
History in Washington, D.C., recently revived the notion that the
puzzling organism was a fungus. He ventured to Canada, Australia
and Saudi Arabia to collect specimens of Prototaxites, tediously
slicing them into hundreds of thin sections and taking thousands of
images of them through microscopes to determine identity.
"He built up a convincing case based on the internal structure of
the beast that it was a giant fungus, but agonized over the fact
that he was never able to find a smoking gun in the form of
reproductive structures that would convince the world that it was
indeed a fungus," said paleobiologist researcher Carol Hotton, also
of the National Museum of Natural History.
The analysis
Now chemical analyses have revealed that Prototaxites was not a
plant, and was likely a fungus, findings detailed in the May issue
of the journal Geology.
Hueber, Boyce, Hotton and their colleagues analyzed carbon isotopes
in Prototaxites and plants that lived in the same environment
approximately 400 million years ago. Isotopes of an element all
have the same number of protons in their atomic nuclei but
different amounts of neutrons. For instance, all carbon atoms
contain six protons in their nuclei, and nearly 99 percent of all
carbon atoms in nature possess six neutrons, for 12 particles
altogether in their nuclei, which is why such atoms are known as
C-12. However, the other 1 percent or so of carbon atoms in nature
contain seven or eight neutrons in their cores, and such isotopes
are respectively called C-13 and C-14.
The researchers found Prototaxites displayed a much wider variation
in its ratio of C-12 to C-13 content than would be expected in any
plant.
Plants, lichen and algae typically get their carbon from carbon
dioxide in the air, so any given type of plant will typically
contain a similar ratio of C-12 to C-13 as another plant of the
same type. Fungi, on the other hand, feed on whatever they grow on,
and their carbon isotope ratios are as diverse as their diet.
Height advantage
As to why the fungus grew so large, Hotton speculated that its size
may have helped it spread its spores farther, "allowing it to
occupy suitable marshy habitats that may have been patchily
distributed on the landscape."
The relatively simple ecosystems Prototaxites lived in certainly
appeared to contain nothing to prevent them from growing slowly for
a long time to huge sizes, since plant-eating animals had not yet
evolved .
"It’s hard to imagine these things surviving in the modern world,"
Boyce said.
Further research into Prototaxites could shed light on that ancient
world, he added. Looking at the carbon isotope ratios of different
fungus samples would shed light on what they were eating, and thus
what their ecosystems looked like. "A lot looked like they were
eating vascular plants, while others looked like they were eating
something else, probably microbial soil activity," he said. "This
gives us an overview of ecosystems not getting preserved otherwise."
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