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Comment by steve_adams_86 | Hacker News Reader

It’s remarkable just how active fungi are in their respective biomes. They seem like passive growths which inhabit decaying materials from afar, but up close, you discover that they’re entwined in virtually all life cycles, quite actively, and they’re absolutely essential to day to day life as we know it.

One of the best things I ever did was go to a seminar on mushroom picking 20 years ago. It opened up my eyes to a whole new world. After reading this I have a sense of amazement at what fungi are capable of, but I’m not surprised at all. The more you dig into it, the more you discover how crazy that world is. Fungus is really cool.

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Indeed, it's no wonder fungi has a whole kingdom of life to itself.

A fun fact I like to repeat is that fungi are more closely related to us than to plants -- their evolution diverged from animals 9 million years after plants, some 1.5 billion years ago.

I love the specificity of the 9 million figure, 1.5 billion years ago.

You set me off on some reading to find out more as it seems so interesting, but I can't find a detailed figure, so I like exactness your estimate provides.

Amazing to consider what the common ancestor was like and also what our animal ancestors were like at that time.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_fungi

This paper by Taylor & Berbee [1] describes one attempt at dating the divergence of clades on the evolutionary tree. Figure 2 shows the evolutionary tree inferred from analyzing the similarity of gene sequences between species. Table 1 shows estimates of the age of last common ancestors.

[1]: https://taylorlab.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/taylorlab...

If you're itching to see the cladistic trees of stuff check out my hobby project https://relatedhow.kodare.com

It's not perfect as the data source is rather rough, but it's by far the best source I know of.

Quite a lot of detail is available at http://timetree.org/

> 9 million years after plants, some 1.5 billion years ago.

This sentence has an unbelievably high temporal resolution. Can you provide a source of that?

That's an unreasonable level of precision to infer from the data available now, let alone what was possible in 1998 when that estimate was made. In fact, there's ongoing debate as to whether fungi split first from all other eukaryotes, or opisthokonts (incl. fungi and animals) split from all other eukaryotes (incl. plants)

Highly recommend watching Fantastic Fungi for anyone else interested in this space:

https://fantasticfungi.com/

Merlin Sheldrake has written an excellent book on this subject, 'Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures'.

https://www.amazon.com/Entangled-Life-Worlds-Change-Futures/...

Here he cooks and eats some Pleurotus that he grew using a copy of his book:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJfDaIVl-tE

Interesting guy, fascinating subject.

The permaculture movement is, in fits and starts, coming around to the idea that the fungi are the real farmers, and we should just stop trying to prevent them from doing their jobs.

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