We had already come across this
idea before and here we have effective confirmation through work on the
underlying genetics. The Carboniferous
was a long era in which massive amounts of wood was produced, but not
significantly degraded. These formed
coal seams as other forms of decay allowed the material to at least settle if
not fully disappear.
In the present, bogs still
produce coal seams but far more local and ultimately limited. Imagine the Amazon unable to decay above the
water logged parts. Those forests were
impenetrable.
This surely had a huge impact on
available large animal forms that needs to be thought through. These were not your modern wildwood at all
and instead presented a tangle that prohibited easy traverses and certainly represented
deadly cul de sacs for the unwary.
Mushrooms stopped coal formation 300 million years ago
Michael
Allan McCrae | July 1, 2012
Scientists may have solved the riddle why so little coal seemed to form
after the end of the carboniferous period.
Mushrooms may have evolved to allow them to fully break down wood,
rather than seeing all the organic matter slip under the earth and get
compressed into coal.
"Wood is a major pool of organic carbon that is highly resistant
to decay, owing largely to the presence of lignin," writes the
researchers.
The researchers discovered that lingin degrading fungi started to
expand when coal formation dropped off.
"Molecular clock analyses suggest that the origin of lignin
degradation might have coincided with the sharp decrease in the rate of organic
carbon burial around the end of the Carboniferous period. "
Lead author Dminitrios Floudas, at the biology department of Clark University ,
published his findings in the journal Science.
The researchers write that the only organisms capable of breaking down
lingin are white rot fungi in the Agaricomycetes, which include
non–lignin-degrading brown rot and ectomycorrhizal species.
"Comparative analyses of 31 fungal genomes (12 generated for this
study) suggest that lignin-degrading peroxidases expanded in the lineage
leading to the ancestor of the Agaricomycetes, which is reconstructed as a
white rot species, and then contracted in parallel lineages leading to brown
rot and mycorrhizal species."
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