Scientists have confirmed that a 26ft tall, tree-trunk-shaped organism, first discovered in Scotland in 1843, isn't a fungus or plant, but an entirely distinct evolutionary branch of life
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/01/21/new-form-of-life-discovered-and-its-26ft-tall/Open linkView original on lemmy.world
21 replies
It’s life Jim, but not as we know it
There's Klingons on the starboard bow
Starboard bow, Jim!
Pardon my ignorance, I seem to have misunderstood the meaning of "extinct" (?).
It's a fossil. Really should be part of the headline.
Oooh, okay yeah.
Man, what I wouldn't give to time travel back millions of years and just have a glance through the window of a pod, to see what it would be like to live here for a day back then.
...because it's multiple lifeforms making a single structure. The plural is correct.
Sounds kinda like coral
Wiki has a breakdown of the debate and how it's evolved: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototaxites
Neat stuff
This has absolutely blown my mind!
This looks exactly like the kind of whose ancestors would, over millions of years, eventually mutate to become a tree.
The polished fossil in the Wikipedia article looks a shocking amount like wood!
Dude; I think you're absolutely correct.
It looks like a proto-tree
Also: Trees aren't a uniform genus, but this goes to show, on any planet that has photosynthesis, trees will eventually evolve spontaneously
there were "trees" before actual trees evolved. in the carbiniferous, mostly from lycophytes,
One of the linked papers thinks it's actually horizontal rather vertical, as people have guessed originally.
Spooky phallus.
That doesn't narrow it down.
There are plants and algae that don't do photosynthesis (although I think they still have vestigial chloroplast?)
@Innerworld “Sandy Hetherington, the lead co-author and research associate at National Museums Scotland, said: “They are life, but not as we now know it”
https://youtu.be/FCARADb9asE
About 7,9248 m (decimal comma)
Decimal commas are a lie to cover up that they found Yggdrasil
https://archive.ph/LEcGT