Scientists have found a giant fungus in the forests of Yunnan Province, China, that towers nearly two feet tall and belongs to an entirely new family tracing back about 65 million years.
The species, formally named Dianjunus rex and nicknamed “D-rex,” produces fruiting bodies up to 50 centimeters tall and weighing as much as 2.2 kilograms, CNN reported. That makes it the largest known member of the phylum Ascomycota, the most diverse group of fungi, with more than 64,000 species.
The team, led by the Kunming Institute of Botany of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, describes a new species, a new genus and even a new family, Dianjunaceae, in the journal Frontiers in Fungal Biology. The fungus grows on the woody roots of Chinese cork oak trees.
Using a genetic “molecular clock,” the researchers dated the new family to roughly a million years after the asteroid impact that ended the Cretaceous period. Corresponding author Indunil C. Senanayake said the timing raises “an intriguing possibility”: the forests left choked with dead plant material after the mass extinction may have opened new ecological niches for wood-decomposing fungi.
Before D-rex, the largest known ascomycete was a bulbous fungus in Kenya about 30 centimeters across, according to the researchers. Senanayake said the team wants to answer next why D-rex grows so large, since such oversized fruiting bodies are normally an expensive energy investment for fungi.
Source: CNN
