Dr. Corentin Loron

But there's two things.

Yes, standing will require some anchorage, but also feeding.

If you indeed a saprotrophic organism and you eat that organic matter and there is not much around, you really need to, you know, crawl around and then seek for this food.

So that's two clues that will guess that there should be some sort of anchoring.

So there is fossil from Protodaxitis from all around the world, and it's possibly in Ireland.

This is something I'd like to investigate.

So far, fragments were reported in the 80s from Conti Tipperary.

So maybe more, maybe there's more to find.

So that's definitely something I'd like to pursue.

Well, I think that's the big question here.

That will help understand all the rest as well, I think, to a certain extent.

They disappear before we see the tree and the forest appearing.

So there's two things.

Either they like fungi, they were doing saprotrophy, and so fungi are very good at doing saprotrophy, and they just outcompete them.

It's like one solution.

So they die because the competition was too harsh with the organism feeding in the same way.

Or they were occupying a niche that the tree took later.

And so they were also outcompeting in an ecological perspective here.

So that's two possibilities.