Palaeontology

Strange, giant prehistoric towers may have been a totally new form of life

By T.K. Randall
April 2, 2025

Image: AI-generated (Bing AI / Dall-E 3) If you happened to go for a stroll through the primordial landscape over 165 million years ago, you would find yourself in a strange world of alien-like life forms unlike anything you can find today.

Perhaps chief among these were the Prototaxites - bizarre towers reaching 26ft into the air.

For many years, scientists have struggled to determine exactly how to fit these peculiar organisms into the tree of life, but now a new study has put forward the notion that the reason it is so difficult to classify Prototaxites is because they might actually be a completely different form of life with no modern equivalent.

This counteracts other earlier studies that concluded Prototaxites were most likely a type of fungus."Based on this investigation we are unable to assign Prototaxites to any extant lineage, reinforcing its uniqueness," stated the University of Edinburgh researchers who penned the new study.

"We conclude that the morphology and molecular fingerprint of P. taiti (a Prototaxite species) is clearly distinct from that of the fungi and other organism preserved alongside it in the [Devonian deposit], and we suggest that it is best considered a member of a previously undescribed, entirely extinct group of eukaryotes."

Exactly what became of this long-lost branch of Earth's tree of life, however, remains a mystery.

All we know for sure is that they died out long ago.

Source: Science Alert

Tags: Prototaxites