BBC WILDLIFE MAGAZINE - While studying California dryland biocrusts (communities of living organisms which inhabit the surface of soils), researchers from University of California, Riverside found something unlikely inside moss.
Not only could the discovery completely rewrite what we know about moss biology, but it could also offer an insight into how plants first moved from the oceans onto land around 470 million years ago.
For a long time, scientists have taken one fact for granted: fungi and moss don’t establish symbiotic relationships with each other (moss would be the only major lineage of land plants with that trait).
A new study published in the journal New Phytologist argues this might be a premature assumption. Given the millions of years of evolutionary history of both mosses and fungi, it’s quite unlikely they wouldn’t evolve any symbiosis.