Mushrooms have a much older prehistory behind them than scientists thought until now. The oldest fossil fungi, 715 to 810 million years old, were found forgotten in a Belgian museum and are at least 250 million years older than the previous record holder who was 460 million years old.
The discovery sheds new light on the prehistory of fungi and the "book of life" on Earth in general. Although fungi play a vital role on our planet, little is known about them, with the exception of some mushrooms. About 100,000 species of fungi have been found to date, but it is estimated that there may be 3.8 million.
The researchers, led by Professor Steve Bonville of the Free University of Brussels, who made the relevant publication in the journal "Science Advances", according to "New Scientist" and "National Geographic", found the ancient fungi in the Royal Museum for the Belgian Central Africa. The fossils, originally discovered in rocks in what was once the Belgian Congo, had remained for decades in the museum, without anyone ever studying them.
"This is an important discovery that forces us to revise the timeline for the evolution of organisms on Earth. "The next step will be to look even further back in the past, in even more ancient rocks, for evidence of these microorganisms that are really at the beginning of the animal kingdom," said Bonneville.
Fungi do a variety of unseen but useful things on Earth, from breaking down dead organisms and recycling nutrients in the environment to making plants possible, providing them with food and water. At the same time, thanks to them, various fermentations are made that allow people to make alcohol, bread, etc., while they are also used as powerful antibiotics against pathogenic bacteria.
Their distant past remains largely mysterious and their fossil record shows large and unexplained gaps. At the time of the earliest known fungi 700 to 800 million years ago the Earth was probably relatively bare, covered perhaps only by biofilms of bacteria. Plants had not yet appeared (this happened after about 300 million years), and neither had animals, and on the then supercontinent Rodinia the fungi probably fed on decomposed organic matter from photosynthetic cyanobacteria and algae, possibly on the edges of lakes or in in the shallow waters.
You can see the scientific study here.