fossil of what may be the early fungi have been discovered in sway see back 2.4 billion old age old . The determination of the ossified filaments , if it can be affirm , would push back the earliest know date of eukaryotic cells – the grouping that contains flora , fungi , and crucially brute – by 500 million years . The study describing the fossils has been published inNature Ecology & Evolution .
The years of the fossils , distinguish by accident in South Africa , is whatshocked the researcherswhen they reanalyzed the careen in which they were found . Initially , they thought that they were around 2.2 billion years old , which in itself would have made the fossil fungi – if they can be verified as such – the quondam eukaryotic cells let on to engagement , but this was later drive back by a further 200 million years .
This is significant because it bilk a point in the Earth ’s geologic history get laid as theGreat Oxidation Event . call up to have occurred more or less 2.3 billion year ago , the Great Oxidation Event grade the pointedness in which the levels of oxygen in the Earth ’s ambiance rapidly increased , due to the activity of the first photosynthetic microbes called cyanobacteria .
If the geological dating of these latest fogy is accurate then , it means that not only did this fungus evolve in the gloomy depths of the ocean sediment , but they did so in the absence seizure of oxygen , which for most eucaryotic cells is a critical component . The researchers , therefore , suggest that these former fungi may have been living in a symbiotic kinship with some form of microbes , using the chemically stored push that they produced .
What is also surprising about these potential dodo fungi is where they have been found . It has long been assumed that the organisms evolve on land , as this is where the legal age of fungi species are institute today . But the rocks in which these latest fossils were discovered forge deeply beneath the waves , under an ancient sea Davy Jones’s locker .
This is a region get laid as the “ deep biosphere ” , and despite host a significant amount of the Earth ’s biomass , is badly see . “ The abstruse biosphere ( where the fossils were find ) represents a meaning part of the Earth , but we know very little about its biological science and even less about its evolutionary story , ” explained Professor Bengtson , who head the inquiry , to BBC News .
Up to now , the first fossil trace of eukaryote dates to around 1.9 billion years sure-enough , and the Old fungus kingdom to 1.2 billion class . This would make these latest fossils a significant discovery in the history of life story on Earth , challenge our understandingof where and when eukaryotes first evolve .
