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Binary_Bark
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Roughly 115 million years ago, when the ancient supercontinent Gondwana was breaking apart, a mushroom fell into a river and began an improbable journey. Its ultimate fate as a mineralized fossil preserved in limestone in northeast Brazil makes it a scientific wonder, scientists report in the journal PLOS ONE.
The mushroom somehow made its way into a highly saline lagoon, sank through the stratified layers of salty water and was covered in layer upon layer of fine sediments. In time -- lots of it -- the mushroom was mineralized, its tissues replaced by pyrite (fool's gold), which later transformed into the mineral goethite, the researchers report.
"Most mushrooms grow and are gone within a few days," said Illinois Natural History Survey paleontologist Sam Heads, who discovered the mushroom when digitizing a collection of fossils from the Crato Formation of Brazil. "The fact that this mushroom was preserved at all is just astonishing.
"When you think about it, the chances of this thing being here -- the hurdles it had to overcome to get from where it was growing into the lagoon, be mineralized and preserved for 115 million years -- have to be minuscule," he said.
Before this discovery, the oldest fossil mushrooms found had been preserved in amber, said INHS mycologist Andrew Miller, a co-author of the new report. The next oldest mushroom fossils, found in amber in Southeast Asia, date to about 99 million years ago, he said.
Full Story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/06/170607141349.htm
And from the Source site: https://news.illinois.edu/blog/view/6367/513053#image-6
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