This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Cowboys have been lassoing cattle for several centuries, but it turns out that fungi developed the same trick 100 million years ago when dinosaurs still walked the Earth. Alexander Schmidt
and colleagues from the Humboldt University of Berlin found evidence of this ancient Wild West scene in a beautiful chunk of French amber. The amber piece lacked the transparent clear beauty of a jeweller’s piece and the debris and dirt inside it suggests that it came from tree sap that had fossilised after it had fallen to the ground. There, it perfectly preserved the species living in the leaf litter, including a species of predatory fungi and the small worms – nematodes – that Schmidt thinks it hunted. The fungus’s weapons were single cells coiled into rings just 10 micrometres in diameter. A thousand of these ...
