
Billion-year-old fossils set back evolution of earliest fungi - pseudolus
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01629-1
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masona
I grew up thinking that roots brought nutrients to trees, but the more we
learn about fungi the more I wonder if trees are just the mechanism of fungi
farming their own nutrients out of thin air. Maybe the entire tree, both above
and below the ground, is a root.

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mzs
another article with a bit more background:
[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fossil-
discove...](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fossil-discovery-
pushes-back-origin-fungi-half-billion-years-180972274/)

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dwaltrip
Does this mean that multicellular organisms may have evolved much sooner than
we thought?

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jonchang
It might push back the date of multicellularity for fungi, but that's evolved
many times and I'm pretty sure some filamentous prokaryotes got there first,
but I don't have a reference handy.

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dwaltrip
Ah ok. I thought that it happened only once or twice on Earth, but I must have
been thinking of the origin of mitochondria.

