This fossil is rewriting the story of how plants spread across the planet

Around 410 million years ago terrestrial life was relatively simple. There were no forests or prairies—land was largely dominated by slimy microbial mats. The types of plants that would eventually give rise to trees and flowers had only just evolved and would take another several million years to fully flourish and diversify.

A new discovery is rewriting the story of how these vascular plants, as they are called, spread onto land. Researchers might have finally resolved a debate about the pervasive but enigmatic fossil organism called Spongiophyton: it seems to have been an unusual life-form called a lichen that could have helped pave the way for land plants to thrive.

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The discovery, published recently in Science Advances, “settles a question that had been open for more than a century,” says paleontologist Geovane Gaia of the Institute of Geosciences at the State University of Campinas in Brazil, who was not involved with the research. Rather than appearing only after vascular plants, as most assumed, lichens “were already there at the beginning, literally helping prepare the ground for plant life.”

Lichens are the symbiotic result of fungi and photosynthetic algae or cyanobacteria working together. Today that amalgam helps to churn lifeless rocks and sediments into nutrient-rich soil everywhere from polar deserts to tropical forests, says study lead author Bruno Becker-Kerber, a paleontologist at Harvard University. Vascular plants have tissues that funnel those soil nutrients from the ground to their stems and leaves.

Because lichens’ soft body tissues are rarely preserved in the fossil record, their origins have remained mysterious. A 2019 genetic analysis suggested they evolved well after the emergence of vascular plants, indicating they probably played little to no role in early land colonization.

But scientists have long debated whether Spongiophyton, which flourished at least 410 million years ago, was actually a lichen rather than an alga. To determine its identity, Becker-Kerber and his colleagues analyzed the underlying chemical properties of lingering organic material within the fossils.

Lichens contain fungi whose cell walls are lined with chitin, the same material that makes up insect exoskeletons. Chitin is loaded with nitrogen, and the team’s results turned up an unmistakable nitrogen signal. “The more we tested it, the more consistent the signal became,” Becker-Kerber says. “It was genuinely exciting.”

There were other fungal traits present, too, such as a distinct branching pattern exhibited by growing fungal cells called hyphae. The results suggest lichens evolved at least 410 million years ago, shortly after the initial spread of vascular plants around 420 million years ago but before the earliest known forests around 390 million years ago.

“If Spongiophyton was a lichen, it may have enabled the expansion of land plants into areas previously uncolonized,” says Matthew Nelsen, an evolutionary biologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, who was not involved with the research.

Becker-Kerber adds that “it’s a major shift in how we view the complexity of life’s first steps onto land. [Spongiophyton] likely weathered rocks, stabilized sediments, cycled nutrients and contributed to the formation of protosoils just before forests developed.”

The emergence of lichens near the beginning of terrestrial plants’ spread suggests a new page in Earth’s early history. “People often tell the story of life’s move onto land as a ‘plant story,’” Becker-Kerber says. “What our study shows is that fungi and lichens were also part of it.”