Evolution Diary

In the latest installment of a major international effort to probe the origins of species, a team of scientists has reconstructed the early evolution of fungi, the biological kingdom now believed to be animals’ closest relatives.

In a report published Oct. 19 in the journal Nature, the researchers outlined evidence that the ancestors of mushrooms, lichens and various other fungi may have lost their original wiggling taillike “flagellae” on several different occasions as they evolved from water to land environments while branching off from animals in the process.

Their losses of flagellae “coincided with the evolution of new mechanisms of spore dispersal, such as aerial dispersal,” said the report, whose first author is Timothy James, a postdoctoral investigator at Duke University who recently relocated to Sweden’s Uppsala University and the Swedish Agricultural University. Spores are tiny biological bodies, often consisting of a single cell, that fungi and certain other organisms use to reproduce themselves.

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