Fungus may appear 1 billion years ago

fossils unearthed from Canada's far Arctic region could date back about a billion years to the earliest known fungus , more than 500 million years earlier than scientists had expected.
paper, published on May 22nd in the journal Nature, describes these primitive fungi, which are tiny, surprisingly complex and silky. Further chemical analysis showed that the fossils contained crustaceans, a chemical commonly found in the walls of fungal cells.
if this analysis is successful, it will reshape scientists' understanding of the evolution of fungi and whether fungi contribute to plant-to-land migration. But some researchers aren't sure if the findings are really fungi. "It seems to me that there is reason to believe that this is true." "But more data will be very helpful," said Mary Berbee, a fungal scientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Corentin Loron, a paleontologist at the University of Liecht in Belgium, and his colleagues discovered the fossils while visiting an area of the Canadian Arctic called the Grass Bay Structure.
had to take a helicopter to the site, which is located near the region's striking cliffs. Paleontologist Emmanuelle Javaux, a consultant at the University of Liecht, said the fossils were well preserved because the rocks formed there were not affected by heat and pressure.
team took pains to cut the fossils into thin slices so they could be analyzed under an electron microscope. The final image shows the twigs with the sphere as the end. At the same time, the silky body is also divided into segments of the diaphragm (the cell wall found in some modern fungi).
the fossils were found in a 1 billion-year-old rock, and the presence of crustaceans in the fossils further convinced researchers that they were fungi that had been preserved after they died a billion years ago. The team named the fungus Orasphaira giraldae.
but the researchers' explanation of the findings puzzled Sylvain Bernard, a geochemist at the Institute of Mineralogy, Materials Physics and Cosmology in Paris, France. Bernard says the presence of many organic molecules may produce similar results, and the results of related chemical analysis have found that molecules are usually nonexistent in crustaceans. "These data do not prove that these micro-fossils initially contained crustaceans."
,000-year-old, countered that the samples may contain crustaceans and other organic compounds. He also noted that the fossil surfaces have chemical signals specific to crustacean and crustacean-like fibers. "Our results are most consistent with chitin." Loron said.
Javaux said the team used DNA changes to accumulate in fungi to calculate when they first appeared, and the results were consistent with molecular studies. These "molecular clock" analyses have traced the origin of the fungus back about a billion years. But Christine Strullu-Derrien, a paleontologist at the Natural History Museum in London, said previous molecular analysis showed that fungi that lived a billion years ago were simple single-celled organisms and did not have the more complex silky structures seen in fossils.
, Strullu-Derrien hopes further research will confirm that the fossils contain crustaceans. "I'd like to believe that this is an important discovery in the world - if it's really a fungus," she said. "
fungus is a true nuclear creature. The most common fungi are various types of ferns, including mold and yeast. More than 70,000 fungi have been found. Fungi are self-made and distinguished from plants, animals and bacteria. The biggest difference between fungi and the other three organisms is that their cells contain cell walls with crustaceans as the main component, unlike plant cell walls, which are made up mainly of cellulose. (Source: Zhao Xixi, China Science Journal)
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