Indeed they are not. They are their own category. Their cell structure is between plant cells and animal cells. A fungi cloud works similar to a brain. They are the things that make life possible. There are fungi living in our body which keeps us alive, we use them for bread, beer and penicillin among many other uses, they break down dead plants to create food for new plants, they divide food and communicate between trees, but they are themselves not plants. The largest living organism on earth is a fungi by the way.
Largest, not oldest. In Oregon, between 2500 and 8500 years old. But fungi existed before plants did, 1.3 billion and plants 700 million years ago. So fungi are much older.
In 2026, research comparing fossils of a prototaxite species with other eukaryotic fossils in the same location found it to be structurally and chemically distinct, suggesting that Prototaxites is not a fungus and instead belongs to an extinct, previously undescribed kingdom of eukaryotic life.[1]
From the paper I linked, it’s really interesting. They think it might be a giant eukaryote previously undefined.
We hypothesized that if P. taiti was a fungus, fossilization products resulting from the selective preservation or diagenetic alteration of glucan sugars would be present, derived from the original main composition of the cell walls including chitin (a polymer of N-acetyl glucosamine), or resulting from the recombination of glucan and protein into new melanoidin-like compounds, like those found in Fungi and arthropods in the Rhynie chert (39). To test this hypothesis, the previously assembled dataset of 47 samples, representing six higher taxonomic groups (39), was combined with 55 additional samples from these six groups and P. taiti (see the Supplementary Materials for full spectra for each sample, images of all sample spots, and details of taxonomic assignment). We then developed a novel analytic pipeline comprising two key steps: data exploration (step 1) and modelling (step 2) (fig. S3 and Supplementary Text Extended Methods). Step 1 aimed to show that biologically informative spectral bands correlated with taxonomic classification of specimens and that molecular fingerprints of organisms in the Rhynie chert retained information regarding their biological affinities, and to select the most relevant spectral features for further modelling. In step 2, we built classification models using supervised machine learning approaches to provide a robust statistical framework to accept or reject the taxonomic classification of each sample based on the selected spectral features.
Indeed they are not. They are their own category. Their cell structure is between plant cells and animal cells. A fungi cloud works similar to a brain. They are the things that make life possible. There are fungi living in our body which keeps us alive, we use them for bread, beer and penicillin among many other uses, they break down dead plants to create food for new plants, they divide food and communicate between trees, but they are themselves not plants. The largest living organism on earth is a fungi by the way.
I did not know that about the oldest living organism thing. where is this ancient fungi?
Largest, not oldest. In Oregon, between 2500 and 8500 years old. But fungi existed before plants did, 1.3 billion and plants 700 million years ago. So fungi are much older.
Gone, but there used to be giant fungus “trees” called prototaxites
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototaxites
From your link.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12822639/
Heh… learn something new every day
Edit: it sounds like it’s a hot topic
From the paper I linked, it’s really interesting. They think it might be a giant eukaryote previously undefined.
Cool. I’ll have to go back and read that tomorrow.