Dr. Corentin Loron

Oh, wow.

Yeah, exactly.

So the idea of the tree we have sometimes has to be rethink a bit in terms of what we know on the genetic now.

But if you take those big category, you will have animals and fungi, which are very close together.

Fungus are actually mushrooms and all are actually our closest cousin on the tree of life.

Then on another branch, you'll have the plants, including the green algae, the red algae, and then the plant, the land plant.

And then we can maybe do another category with all the rest, which we usually call protists, which mean you're neither an animal, neither a fungi, neither a plant.

So it's very broad categories that doesn't especially reflect the genetic.

And who lives in that?

What sort of species live in that?

Brown algae, so if you go on the shore, sometimes you'll find this vesiculosis algae with a bulb.

So those are part of that group, but they really look like an algae.

But this is a very separate group.

Foraminifera as well, tiny shell fossils you can find in sands.

So all of those sort of things.

And a vast majority of those are actually unicellular.

So that's come back to, you know, where prototaxitis can fit, because all the groups, if we take those categories, all the categories that we know are doing sort of massive multicellular stuff, or massive, at least large multicellular structure, like a mushroom, like an animal can do, like plants.

So none of those categories fit, like prototaxitis doesn't look like any of those categories.

So it might be part of the other categories,

things that we knew from unicellular, but maybe in the past we're doing something multicellular.