Fossil Mushroom from Gondwana Is World's Oldest at 115 Million Years
The mushroom somehow made its way into a highly saline lagoon, sank through the stratified layers of salty water and was covered in layer upon layer of fine sediments. In time – lots of it – the mushroom was mineralized, its tissues replaced by pyrite (fool’s gold), which later transformed into the mineral goethite, the researchers report.
The world’s oldest fossil mushroom was preserved in limestone, an extraordinarily rare event, researchers say.
“Most mushrooms grow and are gone within a few days,” said Illinois Natural History Survey paleontologist Sam Heads, who discovered the mushroom when digitizing a collection of fossils from the Crato Formation of Brazil. “The fact that this mushroom was preserved at all is just astonishing.
Before this discovery, the oldest fossil mushrooms found had been preserved in amber, said INHS mycologist Andrew Miller, a co-author of the new report. The next oldest mushroom fossils, found in amber in Southeast Asia, date to about 99 million years ago, he said.
The mushroom was uncovered in the Araripe Basin, in northeast Brazil, in a limestone layer called the Crato Formation.
Graphic by Danielle Ruffatto
“They were enveloped by a sticky tree resin and preserved as the resin fossilized, forming amber,” Heads said. “This is a much more likely scenario for the preservation of a mushroom, since resin falling from a tree directly onto the forest floor could readily preserve specimens. This certainly seems to have been the case, given the mushroom fossil record to date.”
The mushroom lived during the Early Cretaceous, a time of dinosaurs when the ancient supercontinent Gondwana was breaking apart.
Graphic by Danielle Ruffatto
Diana Yates
Source: http://www.ineffableisland.com/2017/06/fossil-mushroom-from-gondwana-is-worlds.html
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