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Comment by pfundstein | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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/

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)

> 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?

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