CBC Quirks & Quarks has a segment on the discovery of some fungus fossils. The fossils were found in shale in the Grassy Bay Formation in the Northwest Territories and dates to the Precambrian era about a billion years ago. All the details are a paper published in the journal Nature.
Elizabeth Turner, a professor of sedimentary geology at Laurentian University was part of the team that discovered the fossils. She told Quirks & Quarks host Bob McDonald that finding the fossils was a major surprise.
The existence of fungus in this time was not unexpected. Scientists studying the history of life had predicted, based on rates of genetic evolution, when certain types of life should have appeared. "But actually finding it was especially joyful because fungus doesn't fossilize very well," said Turner.
These tiny microfossils, described in the journal Nature, are less than one tenth of a millimetre in size and share many characteristics with their modern-day counterparts.
"They consist of a sphere connected to some filaments. The filaments branch off of one another at right angles multiple times. And the filaments contain divisions inside of them indicating individual cells separated from one another along the length of the filament," said Turner.
On top of looking at its physical appearance and its internal organization, Turner's European colleagues also analyzed the microfossil composition."Using a sort of a high-end type of spectroscopy, we were able to identify the material as a form of chitin," said Turner.
Chitin is a major component of the exoskeleton of insects and crustaceans, as well as the cell walls of fungi.
