400 million years ago, before the rise of forests, the land was covered in mossy carpets, loomed over by weird 8 meter tall columns called Prototaxites. These weird giants have long been thought to be some sort of fungus body, slowly digesting rotting matter. A new paper has taken a detailed look at some well preserved fossils from the Devonian of Scotland and reveals that this enigmatic giant wasn't a fungus, wasn't a plant, wasn't an animal, and wasn't a bacterium... it was something else. This week Susie and Rob take a look at the strange world of the Devonian giant Prototaxites and speculate what it might, or might not, have been. In other fungus news, we also take a look at a paper using fungal microfossils to suggests that dinosaur extinction could have been a multi-phase event, before and after the asteroid impact at the end of the Cretaceous.

The main paper discussed this week is "Prototaxites fossils are structurally and chemically distinct from extinct and extant Fungi" by Corentin Loron and colleagues from the University of Edinburgh, published in Science Advances in January 2026 https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aec6277

The other paper is "Fungal proliferation before and after the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction event in North America" by Rosanna Baker and colleagues published in PNAS in May 2026 Fungal proliferation before and after the Cretaceous–Paleogene mass extinction event in North America https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2536899123

Wide screen art by M Humpage