A mushroom is closer to you than to a rose
Fungi share a more recent common ancestor with animals than either does with plants.
Established2 min read
For a long time fungi were treated as peculiar plants: they are sessile, and they have cell walls. Molecular sequences put them with the animals, in a clade called the opisthokonts. The split from plants is the older event. The split from animals is younger, though still on the order of a billion years.
The kinship shows up in details, not in looks. Fungi and animals both use chitin in structural roles, both store carbohydrate as glycogen rather than starch, and both inherited the same basic toolkit for cells that crawl or that build filaments. A rose does its building differently.
Caveats
- 'Closer' means order of branching, not that a mushroom is a kind of animal.
- The date of the split is uncertain by hundreds of millions of years. The order of the split is not.
Sources
- 1Baldauf S. L., Palmer J. D.. Animals and fungi are each other's closest relatives. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 90, 1993.