The largest known organism in the world is a single mat of mushrooms weighing 35,000 tons (nearly two-thirds the weight of the RMS Titanic). This humongous fungus lurks underground and measures miles across in the Blue Mountains of Oregon. If you’re into hard-to-pronounce, hard-to-remember italicized names for genus and species, it’s called Armillaria ostoyae. Mushrooms occupy their own kingdom of life, which split with animals in evolutionary history later than our common ancestor split from green plants. Humans and mushrooms are therefore more genetically alike than either we or mushrooms
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