this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2025
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Fungi: mycelia, mushrooms & more

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Giant, mysterious organisms discovered are impossible to categorize (www.earth.com)
submitted 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Researchers reveal Prototaxites, a giant Devonian fossil, was not a fungus or plant but a unique extinct lineage.

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[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

At the very end of this article which I'm not bothering to read because I've seen nothing but trash (if not outright AI slop) from earth.com in the past, they write:

The study is published in the journal bioRxiv.

bioRxiv is not a journal. It's a preprint server, and calling it a "journal" either means they have an inflexible template to slot this into reading "This study is published in the journal [blah]" or less generously that they genuinely don't know this, which is concerning as fuck.

Here's the actual preprint, but I want to emphasize that preprints like this haven't been peer reviewed. You should really wait until the paper is released in a peer reviewed journal to get the best, most accurate version of it (which earth.com couldn't be bothered to do, instead choosing the sweet, sweet ad revenue knowing 0.01% of their readership would actually read the original).

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago

Great you pointed that bioRxiv does preprints, and not peer reviewed articles.

Personally, I found this theory interesting and thought of sharing it. Let's see where the scientific consensus will lean towards on this matter.