Prototaxites was a massive, trunk-like organism (up to ~8m tall, ~1m wide) that dominated land ~420–370 million years ago, long before trees or complex plants existed. It looked like a tree, but chemical evidence suggests it didn’t photosynthesize. Internally it was made of interwoven microscopic tubes, unlike plant tissue. It’s often described as a giant fungus, but it doesn’t cleanly match modern fungi either, and some researchers think it may represent an entirely extinct branch of eukaryotic life. In other words, early “forests” may have been dominated by something we don’t have a modern analog for.
Prototaxites was a massive, trunk-like organism (up to ~8m tall, ~1m wide) that dominated land ~420–370 million years ago, long before trees or complex plants existed. It looked like a tree, but chemical evidence suggests it didn’t photosynthesize. Internally it was made of interwoven microscopic tubes, unlike plant tissue. It’s often described as a giant fungus, but it doesn’t cleanly match modern fungi either, and some researchers think it may represent an entirely extinct branch of eukaryotic life. In other words, early “forests” may have been dominated by something we don’t have a modern analog for.