Some 400 million years ago, long before dinosaurs or even trees had evolved, an enigmatic organism towered over the landscape like a prehistoric monolith.Now, new research makes the case that the ancient life form is not a plant, animal or fungi and instead may be a completely unknown form of multicellular life.“What we can say, based on all of those new analyses, is that it’s so different from any modern group we have,” said Corentin Loron, a palaeontologist at Edinburgh University and a co-lead author of the research, which published in the journal Science Advances last month.AdvertisementAdvertisementFirst identified 160 years ago, the fossils — known as Prototaxites — measure up to 30 feet (around 9 meters) tall and have long defied easy classification.In the 19th century, scientists initially thought Prototaxites was the rotten trunk of a conifer. Subsequent study, however, revealed it was composed of interwoven tubes, rather than the block-like cells that make up plant tissue.Other scientists argued that it was a lichen-like mass, a symbiotic association between a fungus and algae. In recent years, some researchers thought the organism more closely resembled a fungus, in part because it didn’t appear to produce energy through photosynthesis.The new research focused on three Prototaxites fossils unearthed in the Rhynie chert, a prehistoric land ecosystem near Aberdeen, Scotland. The Rhynie chert is home to the best-preserved examples of the earliest plants, fungi and fauna that colonized land 400 million years ago, during a period known as the early Devonian. The site was once an ancient hot spring like Yellowstone.AdvertisementAdvertisementThe exceptional preservation of the fossils embedded in the rock at the Rhynie chert allows scientists, with the right tools, to detect the chemical signatures of long-vanished molecules, known as …
