A Short History of Nearly Everything

by Bill Bryson

And it doesn’t stop there. Having hauled itself up to a more favourable locale, the slime mould transforms itself yet again, taking on the form of a plant. By some curious orderly process the cells reconfigure, like the members of a tiny marching band, to make a stalk atop of which forms a bulb known as a fruiting body. Inside the fruiting body are millions of spores which, at the appropriate moment, are released to the wind to blow away to become single-celled organisms that can start the process again. For years, slime moulds were claimed as protozoa by zoologists and as fungi by mycologists, though most people could see they didn’t really belong anywhere. When genetic testing arrived, people in lab coats were surprised to find that slime moulds were so distinctive and peculiar that they weren’t directly related to anything else in nature, and sometimes not even to each other.