You certainly wouldn’t want this turning up
in your risotto ai funghi: researchers from
the University of Illinois have found a
mushroom fossil that’s 115 million years old- the oldest discovered to date.
The ancient fungus began life on
supercontinent Gondwana but ended up in
northern Brazil when the Earth’s tectonic
plates shifted. Somehow it made its way to
the bottom of a salty lagoon where it was
covered in many layers of fine sediment. In
time, its tissues were replaced by pyrite, or
fool’s gold, which later mineralised into
goethite to create the fossil.
“Most mushrooms grow and are gone
within a few days,” said researcher Sam
Heads, who discovered the mushroom
when digitising a collection of fossils from
Brazil. “The fact that this mushroom was
preserved at all is just astonishing. When
you think about it, the chances of this thing
being here – the hurdles it had to overcome
to get from where it was growing into the
lagoon, be mineralised and preserved for
115 million years – have to be minuscule.”
The fungus was about five centimetres tall
and had gills under its cap, similar to a
modern-day button mushroom.
“Fungi evolved before land plants and are
responsible for the transition of plants from
an aquatic to a terrestrial environment,” said
researcher Dr Andrew Miller. “Associations
formed between the fungal hyphae
[branching filaments that form the fungus]
and plant roots. The fungi shuttled water
and nutrients to the plants, which enabled
land plants to adapt to a dry, nutrient-poor
soil, and the plants fed sugars to the fungi
through photosynthesis. This association
still exists today.”WORLD’S OLDEST
MUSHROOM FOSSIL
DISCOVERED
WATER IS SOUR
Water doesn’t taste of
anything, right? Wrong.
Researchers at Caltech have
found that drinking pure
water activates the sour
taste receptors in mice.JUPITER IS
THE OLDEST
PLANET IN THE
SOLAR SYSTEM
The solid core of Jupiter
formed just a million years
after the Sun, making it
almost 4.6 billion years old
and about 55 million years
older than Earth, a team
at Lawrence Livermore
National Laboratory
has found.MAKING ART
MAKES US HAPPY
Drawing and doodling cause
an increase in blood flow
in the prefrontal cortex –
an area associated with
the brain’s reward circuit,
researchers at Drexel
University have found.
Somebody pass the crayons.WHAT WE
LEARNED
THIS MONTHFOSSILSPHOTOS: QUEEN MARY UNIVERSITY OF LONDON, JARED THOMAS
Before this discovery,
the oldest mushroom
fossils had been found
encased in amber