It is an extraordinary discovery because the fossils date from 2.4 billion years ago, more than a billion years before fungi were thought to have branched off the tree of life. There is no way to identify the organism with certainty, but whether or not it was a true fungus, it clearly had a mycelial habit. It is a finding that makes mycelium one of the earliest known gestures towards complex multicellular life, an original tangle, one of the first living networks. Remarkably unchanged, mycelium has persisted for more than half of the four billion years of life’s history, through countless
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Mycelium networks from 2.4Bya
