Complex life may only exist because of groundwork by ancient fungi

Extracted from Arctic Canadian shales, the newly discovered billion-year-old fossilised fungal spores and hyphae (long thin tubes) plug the gap in the fossil record and suggest that fungi may have occupied land well before plants. But in showing that fungi probably arrived on land 500m years before plants, the new fossil evidence raises fundamental questions about the start of this symbiotic journey. It was previously thought that plants made the transition to terrestrial life simultaneously with aquatic fungal partners, but the new discovery opens up the possibility that Earth’s lands may have been already being prepared for successful plant life for hundreds of millions of years.

Source: theconversation.com