New Analysis Suggests Mysterious Fossil Was an Unknown Life Form

A recent study in Science Advances has settled a 165-year-old scientific debate. For over a century, scientists have been baffled by Prototaxites—a colossal, eight-metre-tall organism found in the Rhynie chert of Scotland.

Long thought to be a giant fungus, new geochemical analysis conducted on a 410-million-year-old fossil has confirmed it was actually an entirely extinct evolutionary branch of life. With some specimens reaching up to eight metres in height, Prototaxites would have dwarfed every living thing around them. They were the tallest land creatures to have ever lived at this time—Earth’s first skyscrapers.

The scientific consensus eventually shifted towards a fungal affinity. However, Seán Jordan—who co-authored the study with University of Edinburgh researchers—decided to put this hypothesis to the test on specimens from the Rhynie chert deposit. Seán wrote an article for RTÉ Brainstorm on how Prototaxites have long defied scientific classification.

Seán Jordan said: "This strange Devonian giant appears to belong to a group of eukaryotes that no longer exists. At some point in Earth’s history this entire lineage of life went extinct. Perhaps in the future more examples of this group will be found in the fossil record, but for now Prototaxites is the only evidence that it ever existed."