When giant mushrooms ruled the Earth Mushroom is a strange world of powerful and ancient life, it’s not plants or animals, but it belongs to a distinctive kingdom called fungi, and although fungi species are more than plant species So far, after decades of research, we still know very little about these creatures, and modern science is still deepening in research, to discover how much this mysterious innate life shares with our lives and with every other living being on Earth. In order to know the untold story of how fungi shaped all life on Earth, we need tocome back in billions of years.
Fungi and the beginning of evolution
It was the first fossil ever discovered in Gaspé Bay in Quebec, more than 160 years ago, by the Canadian Goliath. John William Dawson was a mushroom called Prototaxites. The first yield means, but the supposedly corrupt Dusun sample was not the first fossil detected, and 17 years ago, it was found. Charles Darwin and his colleague Joseph Dalton Hooker on similar remains of Devonian rock in Scotland, but unfortunately the samples were missing until 2012.
We now know that fungi are the first organisms to come to Earth. In South Africa, lava deposits have found fossils of meselium The oldest record of a multicellular organism on Earth, more than 2.4 billion years ago. They started by smashing rocks to extract a meal of minerals, and it was this process that made the Earth’s surface supportive of plant life, by transforming the rock biological surface into soil.
When fungi inherited the earth
In the Devonian era, more than 420 million years ago, there were no trees, the only animals living on Earth were invertebrates, and the shape of nature was a 9-meter “phototaxis”, at which time fungi were pillars dwarfing nature’s views around them. When the devastating effects of asteroid collisions in biological history wiped out 70% of Earth’s life,The lack of sunlight and plant life that did not die on impact began to decompose, creating conditions for rapidly spreading fungi.
According to research by Dr. Francis Hooper of the Smithsonian Foundation, phototaxis has faced its end at the hands of sophisticated insects, which have begun to be used as a source of food.
Fungi eat death
If it weren’t for fungus activity, we could say that it would have covered the entire surface of the Earth with blocks of hard-to-digest organic matter, By the enzymes you excret, digest the material it grow in, Enzymes are teeth and fungi’s claws. In short, fungi eat death. And so it creates a new life, it’s the way everything is reborn. and by doing so they release nutrients and then these nutrients are provided to plants to keep growing, So that the entire life network is connected, and is connected through fungi.
Our world is always changing, not for better or worse, but for the continuation of life, and fungi will continue to evolve in unexpected ways, to ignore it is a missed opportunity and a terrible mistake. Humans are dominated by the idea that we are the finest species, that we are on top of the food chain, and that the main purpose of the biosphere is to support us, this illusion of biological superiority is the cause of our suffering, because it is the reason of our The selfishness that cheats us.
Since the dawn of history, fungi have been the cornerstones of the evolution of life on Earth, creating soil with rock, feeding plants, greening the planet, bringing life back to Earth after every disaster that occurred, paving the way for civilization and making us what we are now.
