Dr. Corentin Loron

So we are at an era where vegetation is at the very beginning.

So you start to see vascular plants, sort of thing that will lead to the plant we know today, but still have a lot of mosses around.

So the vegetation is about ankle to knee high.

And then suddenly, if you walk in those landscapes, suddenly you can come across the sort of five to eight meter tall organisms.

So it's very, yeah, it's a very contrasted site at that time, about 400 million years ago.

It's gigantic, yes.

So it's an organism that has been discovered at the end of the 19th century that have been called Prototaxitis, which is in Latin for primitive yew tree, because at first it was interpreted as a rotten bark with fungi inside.

And, you know, time pass and interpretation goes, common goes, and people sort of think, oh, it's odd for a plant.

So maybe it's a sort of algae, but it's also odd for an algae.

So maybe, and this was the sort of consensus in the last 30 years that it might be a fungus.

So the same family than mushrooms.

And in terms of anatomy, what you have is a giant bag of spaghetti, basically.

It's an organism that is made of tubes and only tubes, organized in a broad directional fashion for some of them with large ones, smaller ones.

Some have branching, some have knots.

Like an organ, in a way.

Yeah, like...

Really like a spaghetti bowl, really.

I think that's the best metaphor you can have for it.

A standing up spaghetti bowl.

Exactly.