Found in Canada, the fossils preserved the oldest fungi on Earth, which lived about a billion years ago, shortly after the appearance of the first eukaryotes, writes animalworld.com.ua

Fungi play a key role in the biosphere, decomposing dead organic matter and returning these substances to circulation again. It is assumed that without them would not have happened a full "colonization" of land by other organisms. And these function mushrooms perform hundreds of millions of years. According to various sources, their appearance is attributed to the period between 740 million and 1.1 billion years ago. However, until now, the fossil dating back to only about 400 million years has remained the oldest evidence.

However, an article in the journal Nature describes a new find that more than doubles this period. It Emmanuel Zhavo (Emmanuelle Javaux) and her colleagues from the Belgian University of Liege describe a sample found in the Canadian Arctic and dated apart from the 900 million to a billion years ago, the era of the Middle Proterozoic, soon after appeared on Earth first eukaryotes - the common ancestors of mushrooms, plants, and animals.

The studied samples indicate that at that distant time these organisms lived in shallow river waters: various unicellular and multicellular inhabitants of that period are found here. Among them are microscopic fungi, called Ourasphaira giraldae, the largest of which reaches millimeter length.

They look like branching structures with spherical outgrowths, and in their cell walls, chitin is already detected - the biopolymer that makes up the arthropods exoskeleton and the cell walls of modern fungi. The representatives of this kingdom, so ancient and already formed in basic terms, say that mushrooms appeared on the planet several hundred million years earlier than it is customary to think.