Meet ‘D. Rex,’ the Monster Fungus Born in the Wake of the Dinosaur Apocalypse
Scientists just found a record-setting new fungal species, the largest now known in the sprawling Ascomycota phylum. It may have feasted off dying forests during the Chicxulub mass extinction event.
Via Gizmodo
The cataclysmic impact winter that befell the globe after the infamous Chicxulub asteroid collided with Earth roughly 65 million years ago was a veritable feast for fungi ready to devour all of the decaying life suffering through the Cretaceous-Paleogene era’s mass extinction event. Some of the world’s earliest known parasitic “zombie” fungi were already busy feasting during the Cretaceous—but now researchers in China have found evidence that an entirely new family of fungal species arose in apparent response to the…
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