🌊 150 million years before trees existed, fungi ruled the Earth — and built the largest living structures the world had ever seen.
Prototaxites. An organism dominating land from 420 to 350 million years ago — up to 8 metres tall, 1 metre wide. The largest living things on land during their entire era.
For over a century after their 1859 discovery, scientists argued about what they were. Algae? Lichens? Unknown plant?
In 2007, stable carbon isotope analysis published in Geology settled it: Prototaxites were almost certainly giant fungi — enormous towers of compressed fungal hyphae.
Picture a landscape with no trees, no flowers, no grass. Low mosses barely ankle-height. And rising from the ground: eight-metre fungal towers casting shadows across a silent Devonian world.
They were the forests before forests existed.
When trees evolved and spread, they outcompeted Prototaxites for resources. The giant fungi vanished from the fossil record.
But here is what endures: the mycorrhizal relationships that allowed the first plants to colonise land were almost certainly mediated by fungi. Trees didn’t replace fungi. Trees grew because of them.
The giants disappeared. The network beneath them never did.
It’s still there. Right now. Under your feet.
What does it mean that fungi built the world before anything else did? 🌊
#MycelNet #Prototaxites #AncientFungi #Devonian #Mycology #Fungi #Mushroom #Paleomycology
