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#prototaxites

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Mikko Tuomi

Prototaxites represents the first giant organisms to live on the terrestrial surface, reaching sizes of 8 metres in the Early Devonian.

It was an extinct lineage of #multicellular terrestrial #eukaryotes.

Assignments to groups of multicellular algae or land plants have been repeatedly ruled out leaving two major alternatives: #Prototaxites was either a #fungus or a now entirely extinct lineage.

The latter hypothesis seems more plausible based on nrw evidence.

astrobiology.com/2025/03/ancie

Astrobiology · Ancient Prototaxites Don’t Belong To Any Living Lineage - Possibly A Distinct Branch of Multicellular Earth life - AstrobiologyPrototaxites was the first giant organism to live on the terrestrial surface, reaching sizes of 8 metres in the Early Devonian
Public
Jake in the desert

Ever since their discovery more than 165 years ago, massive fossilized structures left by an organism known as Prototaxites approximately 400 years ago have proven impossible to categorize.

Researchers in the UK suggest in a report (yet to be peer reviewed) that Protaxites are a type of organism with no modern equivalent

sciencealert.com/mysterious-gi

ScienceAlert · Mysterious Giants May Be a Whole New Kind of Life That No Longer ExistsEver since their discovery more than 165 years ago, massive fossilized structures left by an organism known as Prototaxites have proven impossible to categorize.
#science#fossils#Prototaxites
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myrmepropagandist

Listen. I wasn't born yesterday. I know that fungi aren't plants: they don't have chloroplasts to photosynthesize. They don't use cellulose for their cell walls like plants.

But what *do* they use then? Chitin! Like a bug! This is what the exoskeletons of insects (such as ants) are made of!

The implications of this are marvelous. Consider #prototaxites the tree-size fungi of the Silurian. They stood tall using chitin. And to me? THAT says that giant ants may be more possible than we think!

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myrmepropagandist

Everyone knows that #Prototaxites was a giant #fungi of The Age of the Fish. Towering giants that soared before "tree" or even "small fern" was even a vague notion. And then? The bugs ate them and THEY grew giant. (and hence came the golden age, the Carboniferous when bugs were big) Right?

Maybe not. I just found out that there is a competing theory about these fossils. Maybe they weren't tree-like in form. Maybe they were more like ... rolled up rugs.
1/

A Devonian landscape, huge scorpion-like arthropods swim in a romanic shallow pool and the giant mushrooms tower in the distance and fog.
Public
DailyMegafauna

Today's #mega...er... organisms...are prototaxites. These large, columnar fossils date to 240-350 million years, and stood 24 feet tall and 3 feet wide when they were alive. During this time period, both plants and animals on land were still quite small--meaning that #prototaxites formed the dominant feature of the land during the #Silurian and #Devonian periods.

But what exactly were these giant spires? First described in 1859, they were originally thought to be very early trees. However, their internal structure of tiny, criss-crossing tubes suggests that this is not correct. Chemical analysis also indicates that prototaxites gained their energy from diverse sources--ruling out the idea that they were plants.

This leads to the conclusion that prototaxites were giant, spire-like mushrooms--and the researchers who completed the analysis suggested that their height helped them to spread spores in an otherwise low-laying landscape.

An alternative explanation--perhaps attempting to account for the prototaxites' unusual height--suggests that they were a matted mixture of liverworts, fungus, and cyanobacteria that got rolled up by external forces and never stood upright. This has been disputed based on the fossils' anatomy and chemical makeup.

Tall, grey spires with no branches tower over the low plants of a landscape. Fog lays over the valley in the background with a mountain range in the distance.
A bearded man with a pick sits at the end of a long, grey prototaxite fossil in a bed of lighter, beige rocks.
Side-by-side images disputing the rolled liverwort theory. A diagram on the left shows that rhizomes would be oriented along the length of the prototaxite. An image on the left shows the perpendicular orientation of preserved rhizomes in prototaxite fossils.
Public
Jens Notroff

When #mushrooms ruled the world …

So, here's the latest entry in
Corrado Nai's #VisibleFungi #SciComm project on all things #fungi in art, culture, and society:

When Earth was crawling with critters and worms, not plants, but giant ancestors of #fungi dominated the world. With their 8-m height, #prototaxites were by far the tallest organisms on Earth, about 400 million years ago (illustration: yours truly).

Discover more in the related Wikipedia page: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fungi_

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