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Before Trees, There Were Fungus Forests
Mary Parrish
Travel back around 400 million years, and you wouldn't have seen any forests, but that doesn't mean there wasn't anything to fill that particular role in nature. Before trees, Earth was covered in "forests" of 20-foot-tall mushrooms.
Mary Parrish
And cats with creepy grins and men in giant hats.
Back in 1859 in Canada, scientists started digging up the fossils of what they believed were ancient tree trunks, but it wasn't until 2007 that they finally confirmed the "tree" was a fungus. The organism, called Prototaxites, towered up to 24 feet tall and made a landscape that looked more like a Super Mario Bros. level than modern Earth.
Smithsonian Institution
Either that, or they were dildos for dinosaurs.
And Prototaxites wasn't just confined to Canada. Fossil hunters have dug up the titanic shrooms all over the world, suggesting that it was probably the biggest life-form on land at a time when animal life was nothing but microbes and worms.
Duncan Smith/Stockbyte/Getty Images
All earthlings were giant versions of the stuff living on your bath mat.