Submitted by Aspergillus Administrator on 17 May 2012
Last week we speculated on reports that fungi may have been a leading cause of the death of the great forests and reptiles at the end of the Cretaceous period of Earth’s history around 300 million years ago. At that time there had been tremendous growth of woody plants over the preceding millennia which effectively locked the majority of the atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) into their stems and there had been no way to release that CO2 back into the atmosphere until fungi evolved to digest wood & lignin and thus rot woody plant tissue. Up until that time most wood simply died and lay on the ground, gradually becoming covered and progressively buried until it slowly changed into coal.
This week we read in Nature that fungi played a fundamentally important role in the development of modern plants. Up to around 400 million years ago the majority of plant life in the world had poor or non-existent roots, leaves and tended to reproduce using spores – much like some simple plants still growing today e.g. Liverworts.
One of the greatest factors influencing plant growth then (and now) is the availability of the chemical phosphorus. This is often in great shortage in soil rendering it infertile, and if a plant has no roots it cannot delve deeply into soil to find phosphorus. However fungi do not need to stay near the surface of soil as they do not need light to grow, so these are free to grown deep into soil in search of nutrients including phosphorus
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2012-05/uos-app051112.php
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