Scientists Puzzled by Giant Ancient Life Forms

Scientists are suggesting there may be a brand new type of life — or, at least, that one existed back in the day.

In a new, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, scientists from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland argue that the massive and mysterious tubelike fossils known as "prototaxites" deserve their own life form classification because, basically, they're too weird to belong to any other.

Since their discovery in the 1800s, prototaxites have long been a head-scratcher and a point of contention for scientists who to this day cannot figure out their nature. Fossils of this bizarre organism, which lived some 400 million years ago, were initially thought to be the remains of rotted trees, complete with the fungi that assisted their decomposition inside them. In 1872, however, a ticked-off Canadian scientist named William Carruthers trashed that concept and suggested, against scientific convention, that the name prototaxites, which translates to "first yew," be changed to "nematophycus," which means "stringy algae."

Fast forward to 2007, and Stanford botanist Kevin Boyce declared, after analyzing the carbon isotypes found within a prototaxites fossil, that the strange monstrosities were some kind of fungus because they seemed to have gotten carbon from other organisms the way fungi do. Now, Edinburgh's Corentin Loron and his team are pouring water on that hypothesis as well — and suggesting, provocatively, that prototaxites don't belong to any other known lineage of organism and thus deserve their own.

To reach that conclusion, Loron and his colleagues analyzed the chemical makeup of Prototaxites taiti, a type of prototaxites found in Scotland that was, unlike its cousins, only a few centimeters tall. Fungi were abundant in the area where p. taiti was found, so the scientists were able to compare the composition of those fossilized fungi to that of the prototaxites fossils.

As they discovered, the cellular composition of p. taiti was vastly different from the fungi that grew alongside it — and indeed, was distinct from all known fungi, extinct or otherwise. Specifically, the prototaxites sample did not contain any chitin, a polymer that makes up fungal cell walls, which to their minds meant that it wasn't a fungus at all. Its anatomy was also "fundamentally distinct from all known extant or extinct fungi," the researchers wrote in their paper, which added to their contention that prototaxites should be granted their own lineage.

Boyce, the botanist who insisted that prototaxites are a fungus nearly 20 years ago, admitted in an interview with New Scientist about the new research that with the information that's been uncovered in the intervening years, "there is no good place" for the organism in the fungal lineage.

"Maybe it is a fungus," he told the magazine, "but whether a fungus or something else entirely, it represents a novel experiment with complex multicellularity that is now extinct and does not share a multicellular common ancestor with anything alive today."

Notably, scientists still don't know why prototaxites went extinct. This new research provides another clue about this bizarre and long-dead organism — and deepens the mystery, too.

More on weird life: Scientists Modified Genes In Mice to Give Them Traits of Woolly Mammoths, and the Results Are Frankly Adorable

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