FOSSIL fungi unearthed in Wisconsin may have helped the first terrestrial
plants to colonise the land, says a Californian biologist.
Most modern land plants have root fungi known as mycorrhizae that help them
obtain nutrients such as phosphorus from the soil. Dirk Redecker of the
University of California at Berkeley and his colleagues examined rocks from a
Wisconsin road cutting that had exposed 460-million-year-old strata. They found
fossilised structures closely resembling the spores and fine thread-like hyphae
of modern mycorrhizae (Science, vol 289, p 1920).
The fossils are the earliest specimens of such fungi, and are the first
examples…
