Lingams of the Old Ones

[Recusant]

A life form of the former world, apparently distinct from those in the present. Call me immature but I see what I see, and they look unequivocally phallic to me. 

"Mysterious Giants Could Be a Whole New Kind of Life That No Longer Exists" | Science Alert

Prototaxites doesn't compare with any other life form we know of. (Loron et al., Science, 2025)

Ever since their discovery more than 165 years ago, massive fossilized structures left by an organism known as Prototaxites have proven impossible to categorize.

Researchers in the UK have suggested in a recently published study that there's a very good reason these oddities don't fit neatly on the tree of life – they belong to a branch all of their own, with no modern equivalent.

Some 400 million years ago, the swamps of the late Silurian period would have sprouted a mix of horsetails, ferns, and other prototype plants that look positively alien today.

Among them stretched 8-meter (26-foot) tall towers that defy easy identification. Wide and branchless, these organisms may have been a form of algae or ancient conifer, researchers suspect, based on what little evidence remains.

Fossils found on the shores of Gaspé Bay in Quebec, Canada, were initially considered by geologist John William Dawson to be the remains of rotting trees, leading to his naming it 'first conifer' back in the 1850s.

Though the name stuck, confusion over the fossil's classification continued until National Museum of Natural History paleontologist Francis Hueber confirmed in 2001 that Prototaxites was indeed most likely an enormous fungus.

That conclusion was backed up years later in 2017 by a subsequent analysis of a fossil fragment assumed to be from the peripheral region of a smaller Prototaxites species named P. taiti.

The 2017 study claimed to identify textures that resembled the fertile structures of today's Ascomycota fungi.

Not everybody is convinced, however, given the possibility that the distinct fragments might not have even been connected.

"In the books and books of anatomy written about living fungi, we never find structures like that," University of Edinburgh paleobotanist Alexander Hetherington told Erik Stokstad at Science magazine.

Hetherington co-led a study on three different P. taiti fragments, concluding there's insufficient evidence to conclude Prototaxites is a fungus at all.

Through a review of microscopic anatomy and chemical analysis of its tubular structures, the team of researchers systematically eliminated each and every candidate group, leaving no modern organism with which it might share some kind of ancestral relationship.

[Continues . . .]

The paper is open access:

"Prototaxites fossils are structurally and chemically distinct from extinct and extant Fungi" | Science Advances

Prototaxites was the first giant organism to live on the terrestrial surface, represented by columnar fossils of up to eight meters from the Early Devonian. However, its systematic affinity has been debated for over 165 years. There are now two remaining viable hypotheses: Prototaxites was either a fungus, or a member of an entirely extinct lineage.

Here, we investigate the affinity of Prototaxites by contrasting its organization and molecular composition with that of Fungi. We report that fossils of Prototaxites taiti from the 407-million-year-old Rhynie chert were chemically distinct from contemporaneous Fungi and structurally distinct from all known Fungi. This finding casts doubt upon the fungal affinity of Prototaxites, instead suggesting that this enigmatic organism is best assigned to an entirely extinct eukaryotic lineage.

[Dark Lightning]

What do you call a 9" tall mushroom? A fungi to have at a sex party. The more we learn, the wilder nature gets.

[Icarus]

The earth may be giving us the middle finger

[Dark Lightning]

[zorkan]

They were big in Dorset.

https://www.visit-dorset.com/listing/cerne-abbas-giant/13338301/