Science & Space

A mysterious 26-foot (8m) tower from Earth’s deep past has been reclassified as something far stranger than a “giant fungus” or an early tree. Researchers studying exquisitely preserved Scottish fossils say Prototaxites represents an entirely extinct eukaryotic lineage - a “new form of life” in the sense that it does not fit into known major groups like fungi or plants. That conclusion, if it holds, changes how we picture ecosystems before forests and familiar land animals took over, reports The Telegraph . The new analysis published in Science Advances focuses on Prototaxites taiti fossils from the 407-million-year-old Rhynie chert near Rhynie in Aberdeenshire, one of the world’s most important early terrestrial fossil sites. Using chemical “fingerprints” and detailed structural comparisons