What an interesting idea, I can't help but visualize Zangermarsh[1] :-) Interesting question about what it might gain evolutionarily by being tall, perhaps more moisture exposure but as others have pointed out fungal mats get that by just being wide and covering a lot of area. Of course if you were competing with a fungal mat being tall might be one strategy.
And by taller than others the spores would be more likely to be carried over everything else by the wind and travel further distances. A short mushroom's spores might end up only traveling a few feet before hitting, say, another mushroom.
Haha that zone totally came to my mind too. It's actually quite cool how many different types of zones Blizzard has made in that game... I wonder if they'll ever run out of ecosystems.
I wonder what those fungus lived on? This was in the era before fungus could metabolize cellulose. Maybe, unlike modern fungus, they just grew bit by bit? The fact that dead wood couldn't easily be digested is part of the reason the Earth's O2 level was so high back in the day, and why you could get coal or oil deposits even without anoxic conditions.
EDIT: All interesting information above from friends who know way more about the subject than me, who I told about the article. Any mistakes are probably mine.
So... Jules Verne was right about YET ANOTHER thing? RE: Ancient giant mushrooms dotting the shore of the prehistoric coast in Journey to the Center of the Earth.
Considering that the fungus theory was raised by Dawson in 1859 (and widely debated), and JttCotE was written in 1864, it's likely Verne was influenced by modern scientific debate.
That's exactly what I thought when I read the title! I'm right now in the process of reading Journey to the Center of the Earth and this struck me. Jules Verne really was quite the visionary...
Of course, he was also wrong about a lot of things. I recall in 20,000 Leagues they travel under the Antarctic ice all the way over the pole... because there was no land there in 1870, I guess.
We don't know that there isn't a way to go under the Antarctic ice mass .. there may well be large enough rivers under the ice, navigable with fancy machines.
Why is it assumed that these mushrooms would grow straight and tall? Trees grow tall to maximize their exposure to their primary energy source, which is of course light. But why would a mushroom need to grow really tall. Don't they obtain all their energy from the land?
It's assumed they grew that way because that's what the fossils look like.
If a fungus had a photosynthetic symbiont, it would have a good reason to compete for height. In fact, an algal symbiont is a leading theory, based on chemical traces that point to algae in the fossils.
Interestingly, lichens do this today: they are composite organisms of fungus and photosyth (algae or cyanobacteria). They don't currently get very high, but perhaps that's just because plants are so much better at height that all tall forms have gone extinct.
If there's no photosynthesis going on, it's harder to explain. Perhaps it's handy in a very low-growing world to lift most of your energy-storage mass or hard-won water above the ground, away from predators?
Part of the reason a mushroom would be so tall is that when the cap opens, the stem is connected to the middle. So a mushroom top that is say, 10 feet across, would be at the very least 5 feet tall. As the top gets heavier the stem would have to be larger in diameter to hold up the increased weight.
It's also not uncommon to find fungi that are several feet long growing on trees and such. Not sure if the article specifically said mushroom or if it was just a fungi they found a fossil of.
Plausible, but not apparently a problem from most fungi currently alive. I would guess that the trade-off in terms of marshaling resources vs. increase in spore distribution would not be favorable enough. I expect that's why the lichen argument appeared - we can easily see why being tall is a plus for photosynthesis.
"So science is messy, and despite more than a century of digging, we still don’t really know, for sure, what these huge spires that dominated the ancient Earth really were."
So despite the link-bait title, we still don't know and they may not be giant mushrooms.
Interesting. Could fungi photosynthesize? I thought not. Unless the earth was covered as a marshland, it would be unlikely mushrooms covered earth. It is likely they are popular around coastal area.
No known fungus does--though there are "radiotrophic" fungus, that use gamma radiation as an energy source.
However, fungus are found with photosynthetic symbionts. Lichen, for example, are a combination of fungus and algae (or similar). It's possible the Prototaxites were giant lichen, which would allow them to live in non-fungus-friendly locales, rather like a tree.
As these broke down and broke down other things around them, they probably created soil (as funguses still help to do) which enabled more advanced plant life to thrive. Love it
I guess now might be a good time to mention John Marco Allegro's theories on the amanita muscaria and its role influencing major religions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Allegro
Cool! I've often imagined alien worlds that had nothing resembling plants or animals, and they invariably ended up with giant fungi. Turns out many of the craziest life forms we can imagine have already existed on Earth.
[1] Its a World of Warcraft zone