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Fungi evolved right on track

     ¹ Botany, The Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois, 60605-2496, United States of America
² Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, IL, 60605-2496, United States of America
³ Farlow Herbarium, Harvard Univ, Cambridge, MA, 02138, United States of America
⁴ Botany, The Field Museum, Chicago, Illinois
⁵ The Field Museum, Chicago, IL, United States of America

Dating of fungal divergences using molecular clocks thus far yielded highly inconsistent results. The origin of fungi was estimated at between 660 million and up to 2.15 billion years ago and the divergence of the two major lineages of higher fungi, Ascomycota and Basidiomycota, at between 390 million years and up to 1.5 billion years ago. Assuming that these inconsistencies stem from various causes, we reassessed the systematic placement of the most important fungal fossil, Paleopyrenomycites, and recalibrated internally unconstrained, published molecular clock trees by applying uniform calibration points. As a result, the origin of fungi was re-estimated at between 760 million and 1.06 billion years ago and the origin of the Ascomycota at 500-650 million years ago. These dates are much more consistent than previous estimates, even if based on the same phylogenies and molecular clock trees, and they are also much better in line with the fossil record of fungi and plants and the ecological interdependence between filamentous fungi and land plants. Our results do not provide evidence to suggest the existence of ancient 'Protolichens' as an alternative to explain the ecology of early terrestrial fungi in the absence of land plants.

Key words: Ediacaran, Eurotiomycetes, Late Proterozoic, Lecanoromycetes, Protolichenes

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