Long Before Trees Overtook the Land, Earth Was Covered by Giant Mushrooms

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/long-before-trees-overtook-the-land-earth-was-covered-by-giant-mushrooms-13709647/

by myinnerbanjo • 8 years ago

253 101 8 years ago

smithsonianmag.com

aktau• 8 years ago

When I read the title, I immediately thought of Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne (1864). The flora are described as consisting of "...surrounded by a rocky coastline covered in petrified trees and giant mushrooms".

JKCalhoun• 8 years ago

The obscure Japanese horror: "Mantango" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matango).

PeterSmit• 8 years ago

Re-post. Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6669659

mirimir• 8 years ago

The title should include "(2013)".

Edit: Maybe change this to https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/jan/16/strangest-th...

shaki-dora• 8 years ago

Or (350,000,000 BC)

fouc• 8 years ago

A landscape populated with fungus-like spires of 6-8 meters tall. Amazing.

Makes me think of Omnivore (Of Man and Manta, #1) by Piers Anthony. A planet full of fungus, with fungoid animals.

andai• 8 years ago

What were the animals like?

http://www.earthexplodes.com/comics/070/

staticelf• 8 years ago

The question is how large the organisms must have been under ground: http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20141114-the-biggest-organism...

alex_duf• 8 years ago

Makes me think about that Tintin cover: https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/711FqYcc7eL...

theandrewbailey• 8 years ago

Or many places from Morrowind: https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/elderscrolls/images/d/d3...

tjpnz• 8 years ago

Or millions of planets from No Man's Sky.

scrumbledober• 8 years ago

or minecraft: https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Mushroom_Fields

benj1112• 8 years ago

This links to a wikipedia page https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototaxites

So they don't look like toadstools. (sorry)

I'm confused about how these fit in the ecosystem though. Are these still just the fruiting bodies? Are they permanent?

sampo• 8 years ago

It doesn't sound very plausible to grow such sturdy and tall structure only for a fruiting body, so you can drop your spores from a bit higher. But a tree-like structure feels plausible, it they were in symbiosis with algae (which would make them lichens, technically) and they did photosynthesis.

benj1112• 8 years ago

I was thinking on the same lines, although are they still mushrooms in that case? Plus there precedents for very tall flowering/fruiting spikes

thaumasiotes• 8 years ago

I was wondering something similar. Why does fungus want to be tall? Trees are tall so they can reach the sunlight, allowing them to overshadow and kill plants that would grow under the trees if it wasn't so dark there. But fungus doesn't need light.

blahedo• 8 years ago

I'm not clear from the Wikipedia page whether those illustrations reflect actual "we found branching specimen fossils" knowledge, or speculation based on "we think it's tree-ish so it must branch". The illustrations that show branching both appear to date from the 19th century.

liveoneggs• 8 years ago

giant asparagus monsters are good enough

ThomPete13• 8 years ago

Completely unsupported thought:

Could the ancient mushrooms and some of the theories about how mushrooms were the reason we became conscious be linked?

https://mic.com/articles/14276/magic-mushrooms-how-they-play...

nicoburns2• 8 years ago

I'm always very skeptical of people who make these kind of claims about psychedelics. One of the effects of psychedelic drugs is that they make people see things as significant or important even where there is nothing significant to be found (in the same way that drugs like MDMA increase mood, even when none of the normal mood-increasing things are present in the environment).

This is fine, and can be useful so long as you keep it in mind. But also leads to some users of psychedelics who believe in all sorts of crackpot theories that they think they have discovered through something that seems akin to divine revelation, and are so utterly convinced of their truth that it goes beyond all reason.

code_duck5• 8 years ago

“users of psychedelics who believe in all sorts of crackpot theories that they think they have discovered through something that seems akin to divine revelation”

You’re aware that psychedelics have been used extensively for millennia by many cultures in religious ceremonies, right?

ThomPete13• 8 years ago

Me too, however unless one think there is some magical component to consciousness then couldn't it be as good an explanation as many others?

I am a pretty skeptical person when it comes to these things too (doesn't even believe in god) but it doesn't strike me as such a far out explanation although as I said I have no base other than what is out there. It's at least a contender that should be taken seriously IMO.

coldtea8• 8 years ago

One of the effects of psychedelic drugs is that they make people see things as significant or important even where there is nothing significant to be found

Do they really? Or do they provide significant or important insights that are there anyway, but we can't reach them in our regular state?

This is like saying amphetamine provides an alertness that wasn't there in the host (who was, e.g. tired before taking it). Sure, that doesn't mean it's a bogus alertness.

jpfed• 8 years ago

Actually serious- have scientists tried given study participants psychedelic drugs specifically to understand the mechanisms underlying people's sense of what is significant or important?

samstave• 8 years ago

"It must be changing something about the internal communication in my brain. Whatever my inner process is that lets me solve problems, it works differently, or maybe different parts of my brain are used, " said Herbert, 42, an early employee of Cisco Systems who says he solved his toughest technical problems while tripping to drum solos by the Grateful Dead – who were among the many artists inspired by LSD.
"When I'm on LSD and hearing something that's pure rhythm, it takes me to another world and into anther brain state where I've stopped thinking and started knowing," said Herbert who intervened to ban drug testing of technologists at Cisco Systems.

---

I can't find the original article I read years ago, but there was one article where they claimed they came up with BGP on LSD...

https://www.wired.com/2006/01/lsd-the-geeks-wonder-drug/

PhasmaFelis3• 8 years ago

It's an interesting idea, but these giant mushrooms went extinct millions of years before the development of land vertebrates, much less mammals and primates.

ThomPete13• 8 years ago

Sure but how much of them went extinct?

I am not strong on early stage primordial soup and what went on there but I find it a little hard to believe that something went completely extinct and then something completely new appeared. Surely there must be something that survived no?

pvaldes• 8 years ago

Not probable. Slugs aren't conscious and eat much more mushrooms in variety and weight than we eat. Even very poisonous mushroms that could kill easily a human.

On the other hand, there is not much (chemically speaking) in a mushroom that plants can't do. If the humans had achieved conscious eating "X", X could be anything. There is not need to fill the gap in this hypothesis with a mushroom.

patrickg_zill• 8 years ago

Like the famous anime movie "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Winds"...?

whizzkid• 8 years ago

As a side note, this came to mind when I opened the link. A sad state really..

https://www.reddit.com/r/web_design/comments/9pmqxb/typical_...

chmod775• 8 years ago

Mobile reddit brings my phone's browser to its knees. It takes ages to load, is unresponsive, and it also takes an extra 10 seconds to click the 8px font that dismisses their mobile app advertisment.

I can only assume that mobile app was the best solution they could come up with after they realized they made a horrible mobile site.

ceejayoz• 8 years ago

I think you've got it backwards. The mobile site is deliberately shitty to drive you towards the app.

pureliquidhw• 8 years ago

No, their mobile site was fine UNTIL they made a mobile app. Just like old reddit used to be, it was lightweight and responsive.

Once they released a mobile app to compete with the great mobile app offerings that already existed, they crippled the mobile site with all those ads.

plytheman• 8 years ago

The real sad state is why is that site uploaded as a reddit video? Instead of linking to the original content it's a video of someone else clicking through? As for the Smithsonian site, I've got AdBlock, uBlock, and ScriptSafe running so I didn't get anything too obnoxious, but it is pretty pitiful that we need that many add-ons just to browse the web.

briantakita• 8 years ago

The atmospheric CO2 levels were considerably higher back then.

https://phys.org/news/2011-04-araucarias-gauge-ancient-carbo...

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/11/171127152109.h...

charlesism• 8 years ago

Odd that so many forms of life were a bit larger in the distant past. I gather physicists are sure that gravitational G is a constant (as opposed to a variable). I wish I'd studied more physics so I could evaluate how silly an explanation that would be.

api• 8 years ago

Paging Terrence McKenna... :)

hliyan• 8 years ago

Off-topic / website format: it's disheartening to see that even an institution like the Smithsonian must serve so much crud to deliver us what is essentially 14 sentences + 2 quotations worth of material...

jrobn2• 8 years ago

Dollars and cents my man. I really only see this getting worse with IoT devices and more and more tracking. When they finally figured out a reliable way for direct brain to computer interface the human race may be in a dark place indeed.

jimmaswell• 8 years ago

Dream commercials like in Futurama could be a real possibility.

hinkley• 8 years ago

Subliminal messages are a more immediate threat.

forgotmypw4• 8 years ago

With JS disabled, the page loaded in under a second on public WiFi and displayed just fine.

sillyquiet• 8 years ago

The (EXCELLENT) PBS channel Eons has video on this too. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-G64DagHuOg

zwkrt• 8 years ago

PBS has many very good YouTube channels. I particularly like Space Time (physics) and Infinite Series (math).

revskill• 8 years ago

Stupid ads and notifications prevent me to read this article.

samirm• 8 years ago

Came across this after the Paul Stamets episode on JRE :)

momentmaker• 8 years ago

This TED talk was very interesting about some fungi facts.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XI5frPV58tY

On a side note, I thought this was an interesting take on Bitcoin in relation to fungi.

https://medium.com/@BrandonQuittem/bitcoin-is-a-decentralize...

mml• 8 years ago

TL;DR: we found these things years ago, one group says they're mushrooms, the other group says they're something else. The first group just published something saying they are so, neener.

booleandilemma• 8 years ago

The one time I wish there was an artist’s rendering...

dajohnson89• 8 years ago

Same here --- i manically scrolled looking for a mushroom-covered earth...but alas.

rezmason• 8 years ago

One of my favorite science blogs had a short write-up on this five years ago, it's a fun read:

http://www.maryanningsrevenge.com/2013/12/awesome-dead-shit-...

ohiovr• 8 years ago

Petrified ancestors of Lenin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenin_was_a_mushroom

Long Before Trees Overtook the Land, Earth Was Covered by Giant Mushrooms

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