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"This certainly seems to have been the case, given the mushroom fossil record to date." The study published in PLOS ONE used a scanning technique called electron microscopy to show
Gondwanagaricites magnificus had gills under its cap instead of pores or teeth. This helped place it in the fungal order Agaricales - also known as gilled mushrooms - that release spores
used to identify species. Agaricales has 33 living families including some of the most familiar such as the ubiquitous common mushroom, the deadly angel, the hallucinogenic fly agaric and
the bioluminescent jack-o-lantern. Dry land was first colonised by primitive mushrooms before life could bloom. Before there could be flowering plants or trees or the animals that depend on
them the processes of rot and soil formation needed to be established. Dr Miller said: "Fungi evolved before land plants and are responsible for the transition of plants from an aquatic
to a terrestrial environment. "Associations formed between the fungal hyphae and plant roots. "The fungi shuttled water and nutrients to the plants, which enabled land plants to
adapt to a dry, nutrient-poor soil, and the plants fed sugars to the fungi through photosynthesis. This association still exists today." A 440 million year-old fossil of a fungus that
looked like a mushroom has previously been discovered in Scotland and Sweden.
