BS: Before and After

Subject: BS: Before and After
From: Donuel
Date: 15 Mar 21 - 07:50 AM

Before there were fungi the fallen forests just fell and slowly compressed into coal. After fungi, the lignon was finally eaten and decomposed. Today because of mushrooms no more coal will ever form.
the most beautiful mushrooms in OZ

maybe there are other before and after stories about the mystery of emerging life from recycled life.

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: Donuel
Date: 15 Mar 21 - 07:59 AM

Like advanced species fungi arrived rather late in the evolutionn of life.

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 15 Mar 21 - 08:44 AM

Misinformation. Fungi were around big time in the Carboniferous period and had been for hundreds of millions of years. There is plenty of evidence that decay of lignin by fungi and bacteria was routine in the Carboniferous. Coal measures were formed via the very different environmental conditions pertaining at the time. A hot, wet climate with high carbon dioxide levels favoured the rapid growth of forests. Initial burial of fallen trees in acidic swamps, resulting in anaerobic conditions unsuited to decay organisms, were probably the major driving force, with tectonic burial of future coal deposits also playing its part. Certainly there was a peak time for coal formation, but that wasn't the end of it. There are tertiary coal deposits a few miles from me that were once exploited on a small scale.

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: Donuel
Date: 15 Mar 21 - 09:20 AM

I don't doubt you were there. Fungi are not flora and not Fauna but an amazing life form that needed a niche and exploited it once it was there.
You have a link to 'fossilized mushrooms' prior to tree life forms?

'You are the omnicient guardian of the status quo but our thinking has moved on be it in archeology, anthropology, biology and alas even botany.'

Prove me wrong, it will only take 100 million years to show you there are no more coal deposits as a result of fungi that came after plants evolved. Or do you believe God made all life forms in the same 7 days :^/ I prefer evolutionary symbiosis and the fact some mysteries are unsolvable to humans. Sometimes you can not go back to school for the truth but have to blaze a trail of your own or allow others to do so.

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: Mrrzy
Date: 15 Mar 21 - 09:59 AM

It is not a fact that some mysteries are unsolvABLE.

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: Donuel
Date: 15 Mar 21 - 11:00 AM

Obviously my some is not your sum.
By way of slime and molds I knew Steve couldn't resist resisting.
I think he likes the omnicient thing. Aren't the mushrooms in OZ pretty?

The two basic fungi are those that reduce inanimate life to more basic components. The other is parasitic in a multitude of ways, some prey on insects, some birds and mammals. Some go to mouse brains and change their behavior. We all know about the ones that enlighten or entertain homo sapiens as well as nourish.

Old eco systems are are unfathomably complex and interdependent.

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 15 Mar 21 - 11:04 AM

I'm afraid that it's you who has failed to move on. The notion that fungi weren't digesting lignin in the Carboniferous has long been debunked. There are other reasons a-plenty why coal deposit formation peaked (but did not disappear) at that time. Like all living organisms, fungi require the right environmental conditions in which to operate effectively. Those conditions were denied to them in many areas during the Carboniferous, particularly in anaerobic, acidic swamp conditions, just as today in modern peat deposits. Your pursuit of that line of enquiry, should you go in that direction, would bear fruit.

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 15 Mar 21 - 11:57 AM

Try googling this, from ars technica. It's a gentle read:

"Why was most of the Earth’s coal made all at once?
It wasn’t because fungi couldn’t break down early trees, study argues."

And then there's peat, which is a bit like coal (all right, so it isn't made from huge great Carboniferous trees...) that hasn't been buried, squashed and warmed up a bit. Plenty of that here in Cornwall...Wales...northern England...Scotland...Ireland...everywhere coolish and damp, really...Those fungi would have it all if they could, but they can't because of environmental barriers..low pH...no oxygen... Geddit?

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: Donuel
Date: 15 Mar 21 - 05:00 PM

It takes a hard core botanist to argue over slime. %^}

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 15 Mar 21 - 07:08 PM

I'm not arguing with you. I'm correcting you. There appears to be an awful lot you don't understand about fungi, which you appear to equate with "mushrooms." Same with slime moulds for that matter. They aren't fungi, old boy. That's all, really.

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 15 Mar 21 - 09:22 PM

Your Australian man is a superb photographer and communicator and I admire his great enthusiasm. Unfortunately, he perpetuates the error that fungi couldn't digest lignin in the Carboniferous. Fungi existed at least 700 million years ago and probably a lot longer than that, and there's plenty of evidence that there were some fungi and some bacteria that were happily digesting lignin possibly even before the Carboniferous. Here's something to google that knocks the stuffing out of the penny-in-the-slot myth: "Delayed fungal evolution did not cause the Paleozoic peak in coal production," a PNAS research article. Take a look. It's a stern read but you should manage it.

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: Donuel
Date: 16 Mar 21 - 07:35 AM

Good on you for even knowing about this obscure controversy. Of course I know the difference between various groups of Fungi. Some may resemble each other but are as different as jellyfish and corals and non fungi like lichen are amazing communities and not a single life form.
I once found a new species of a bright yellow mushroom and submitted its spores to the depository of life forms which is only 3 miles away. Unforunately they also store virus. The facilities has many incinerators and is quite an impressive place hiding in plain sight. I've noticed they get enourmous deliveries of liquid oxygen.

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: Donuel
Date: 16 Mar 21 - 03:58 PM

Fossils were found. The researchers found that land plants had evolved on Earth by about 700 million years ago and land fungi by about 1,300 million years ago — much earlier than previous estimates of around 480 million years ago, which were based on the earliest fossils of those organisms. Prior to this study, it was believed that Earth's landscape at that time was covered with barren rocks harboring nothing more than some bacteria and possibly some algae. No undisputed fossils of the earliest land plants and fungi have been found in rocks formed during the Precambrian period, says Hedges, possibly because their primitive bodies were too soft to turn into fossils.

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: Donuel
Date: 17 Mar 21 - 11:19 AM

It looks like fungi are multicellular life that have survived every extinction event on Earth for a billion years. If we ever terraform Mars, making it moldy may be an important step after we solve the water problem. Garden rule 1 - prepare the soil...
Spores delivered by astroids from preceeding life is the panspermia theory.
Which came first the chicken or the egg?
The sperm/spore.

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: Mrrzy
Date: 17 Mar 21 - 04:13 PM

Um, correcting *is* arguing [well, a form of]. See? I have both corrected you *and* argued with you, all at the same time...

Department of contradictions? Or was it Abuse?

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 17 Mar 21 - 06:30 PM

You're too late on this, Mrrzy. And if I state the actual situation as it obtains, as opposed to a made-up one, I'm correcting, not arguing. Move on, mate.

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: keberoxu
Date: 17 Mar 21 - 10:03 PM

... there's a fungus among us ...

(old African-American preacher-in-church joke)

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: robomatic
Date: 17 Mar 21 - 10:20 PM

It's not the fungi I have a problem with.

It is Donuel and facts that have proven to be fungible.

Subject: RE: BS: Before and After
From: Donuel
Date: 18 Mar 21 - 06:37 AM

Fun with fungi reminds me of Ghostbusters.
Estimates on spores range from 400 million to one billion years old. At first I thought the small age would effect coal formation, but Steve is right, they would not. Things like deforestation might.
There is the possibiity that ocean fungi, a pedecessor of land fungi with spores with thicker walls, could make fungi a bit older.

Which came first bacteria or fungi? The smart money is on germs.

I live on the oldest mountain chain on Earth. The Atlantic rift divided the Adirondacks in a way that the other end is in Scotland. We probably share fungi deep in the Earth.
Robo I have more questions than answers and always have.
Wondering is wonderful. The envitable is enevitable and g iven entropy and assumptions everything we think we know will change.