If #Prototaxites isn't a fungi, and it's not a plant: What on earth is it?

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

If #Prototaxites isn't a fungi, and it's not a plant: What on earth is it?

It would be very strange to have a living thing from a previously unknown branch of life AND it's this huge giant towering structure.

What if it was the first thing to crack the code for growing large? A runaway.

WHAT IF ITS ALIENS?
(someone calm me down please)

OK what if it's Siphonophore-like? Or something lichen like? eg not just one organism?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqT8Q8plKJ8

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aec6277

[indigoparadox@mastodon.social]

@futurebird I didn't realize Intuit's ProTax was a pun. Anything by Intuit is a fungus, tho.

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

It would be so fitting if aliens showed up. And they were just these big dildos as tall as a house that hung around for a few million years then moved on.

(There isn't any good reason to think it's not part of earth life, sadly. It's just not fitting into any major group very well. But it has always been an outlier. If only we could ask the early arthropods, they knew the answers.)

[raven667@hachyderm.io]

@futurebird one random thought im having is that some kinds of life are so different from one another, like fungus, jellyfish or squid that they might as well be aliens. Like, the condiditions of different environments on earth, working from the same physics, produce so many wild forms, and so much convergent evolution, that would life on any other planet _really_ be different, or would we see clear analogs to earth organisms with similar niche? Would we see tree-shaped things, because of physics, grass shaped things, fish shaped things, bird shaped things, snake shaped things, insect shaped things etc etc because those shapes are efficient?

[doctormo@floss.social]

@futurebird

They had to grow tall because there wasn't mushroom.

[hydreprever@mathstodon.xyz]

@futurebird this thing was saprotrophic and the largest organism in its ecosystem. This feels wrong.

[catsalad@infosec.exchange]

@futurebird Aliens!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prototaxites

[michael_w_busch@mastodon.online]

@raven667 @futurebird

Without any actual aliens, scientists argue about what we might expect.

Convergent evolution should happen, but there are limits to that. A bird's wing is not a bat's or a pterosaur's, and all of those have common ancestors within the last 300 million years or so.

Actual aliens will have an entirely separate biochemistry underneath whatever similarity in morphology may or may not happen.

As opposed to, for example, baker's yeast and us sharing a quarter of our genes.

[count_01@mastodon.social]

@futurebird It's never aliens. Or lupus.

[dr2chase@ohai.social]

@futurebird early arthropods probably ate the giant dildo things.