White-rotting fungus with clamp-connections in a coniferous wood from the Lower Cretaceous of Heilongjiang Province, NE China

Life in the woods: Taphonomic evolution of a diverse saproxylic community within fossil woods from Upper Cretaceous submarine mass flow deposits (Mzamba Formation, southeast Africa)

“…Erasmus (1976, figs 1, 7) also illustrated, but did not describe, white and soft rots in an araucarian wood from the Cretaceous of Natal. Additionally, Tian et al (2020) reported a well-preserved fossil mycelium consisting of clamp-bearing septate hyphae in a petrified coniferous wood from the Lower Cretaceous of northeast China. The decay symptoms of this wood strongly indicate that the fungal mycelium belongs to a white-rot fungus.…”

“…Moreover, the earliest evidence for arthropod boring occurs in wood-like substrates of the enigmatic fungus-or lichen-like Prototaxites from the Early Devonian (Hueber, 2001). Although most past studies of saprotrophs have focused only on fossil fungi (e.g., Wilkinson, 2003;Pujana et al, 2009;Tanner and Lucas, 2013;Feng et al, 2015;Gnaedinger et al, 2015;Toumoulin et al, 2016;Harper et al, 2017;Greppi et al, 2018;Biswas et al, 2020;Gnaedinger and Zavattieri, 2020;Scaramuzza dos Santos et al, 2020;Tian et al, 2020;Gou et al, 2021;Li et al, 2021;Rombola et al, 2022), a few have investigated whole saproxylic biocoenoses. Thus, there are now sporadic fossil records of such communities for most geographic regions and geological periods, especially within the Mesozoic (Taylor and Osborn, 1992;McLoughlin et al, 1995;Slater et al, 2012Slater et al, , 2015Strullu-Derrien et al, 2012;Kustatscher et al, 2013;McLoughlin and Strullu-Derrien, 2015;Greppi et al, 2021;Wei et al, 2019;McLoughlin, 2020;Rößler, 2021).…”

Fossils of parasitic fungi

“…Both types of occlusion could have developed to contain antagonistic fungal expansion. Basidiomycota have also been identified as the causal agents for decay in conifer wood from the Jurassic (˜160 Ma) and Cretaceous (˜75 Ma) of Argentina (Sagasti et al ., 2019;Greppi et al ., 2022) and the Cretaceous (˜120 Ma) of China (Tian et al ., 2020), either directly based on the presence of clamp-bearing hyphae in the decayed areas of the wood, or indirectly based on micro-patterns that are consistent with patterns generated by xylophagous Basidiomycota in present-day conifer wood.…”

“…Pteropus brachyphylli (Pleosporales) is a fossil ascomycete that occurs on leaves of a conifer from the Upper Cretaceous of Belgium (˜67 Ma). Nearly all stomata of the host leaves are occupied by the fungus, suggesting that the association was parasitic rather than saprotrophic (van der Ham and Dortangs, 2005).…”

Blue stain fungi infecting an 84‐million‐year‐old conifer from South Africa

“…Despite this lengthy fossil record, there are relatively few studies of wood colonizing fungi (e.g. Pujana, et al, 2009;Feng et al, 2015;McLoughlin & Strullu-Derrien, 2015;Harper et al, 2017;Gnaedinger & Zavattieri, 2020;Scaramuzza dos Santos et al, 2020;Tian et al, 2020). Nowadays, fungi that induce white, brown, or soft rots are recognized as the major groups capable of degrading wood, but not all to the same level: only white rot fungi have the potential to degrade the entirety of the wood structure.…”