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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:

You've probably seen a lichen, even if you didn't realize it. If you've ever meandered through the forest and wondered what the crusty stuff on trees or rocks was, they're lichens, a combination of algae and fungi living together almost as if they were one organism. And since they can grow on bare rocks, scientists thought that lichens were some of the first organisms to make their way onto land from the water, changing the planet's atmosphere and paving the way for modern plants. A new study in Geobiology upends this history by delving deep into the DNA of the algae and fungi that form lichens and showing the lichens likely evolved millions of years after plants.

[...] The early lichen fossil record isn't very clear; it can be hard to tell lichen fossils apart from other fossils, and all the fossils that scientists know for sure are lichens are younger than the oldest complex plant fossils. So, the researchers used the fossils that were available to extrapolate the ages of family trees of lichen-forming fungi and algae. They compared these family trees with ages of fossil plants. The verdict: lichens probably evolved long after complex plants.

[...] Unearthing the age of lichens makes it clear that the pattern of modern lichens showing up on rocks before plants doesn't mean that lichens evolved before plants. "It provides a snapshot into what was going on deep in time on Earth, and when some of these groups started appearing," says Nelsen. And since lichens growing on soil can make the ground wetter, hold the soil in place, and influence the kind of nutrients present in soil, learning when lichens arrived on the scene use us a clearer picture of the world in which complex plants evolved.

No support for the emergence of lichens prior to the evolution of vascular plants^$, Geobiology (DOI: 10.1111/gbi.12369)

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