The 400-million-year-old giants that ruled Earth before trees existed

Space · Published 22 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: Before forests rose, Earth was dominated by towering, spire-shaped organisms reaching heights of 26 feet. For over 150 years, scientists debated whether these mysterious structures were early fungi or plants. New chemical analysis suggests a startling third possibility: they represent an entirely independent branch of complex life that has since gone extinct.

Discovered in 1843 by Canadian geologist William Edmond Logan, the fossils of Prototaxites have long baffled paleontologists. Found in locations like Quebec and the Rhynie chert rock formation in Scotland, these massive, trunk-like columns were the largest known organisms on land during the early Devonian period. While they shared some visual similarities with rotten conifer trunks, their internal structure—a network of interwoven tubes—initially led many to classify them as an early form of fungus.

A 2026 study published in Science Advances utilized infrared microspectroscopy at the Diamond Light Source to probe the molecular composition of Prototaxites taiti. The research revealed that while fungal hyphae typically follow orderly patterns, the tubes in P. taiti were arranged chaotically and even resembled plant structures. Crucially, chemical fingerprinting showed no evidence of chitin or glucan, the essential substances that provide structure to fungal cell walls.

These findings suggest that Prototaxites was not a fungus or a plant, but an independent experiment in building large, complex multicellular organisms. The spectral similarities within the samples indicate that P. taiti was a single organism rather than a symbiotic association of different species. This discovery implies that early terrestrial life included major lineages of complex eukaryotes that flourished for millions of years before disappearing completely from the fossil record.

The study highlights how Prototaxites represents a 'lost' branch of evolution. By identifying these unique chemical bonds and functional groups at a microscale, researchers have moved beyond visual guesswork to confirm that Earth's early terrestrial landscapes were home to biological architectures that have no modern equivalents.

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