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A mushroom of this type in the Malheur National Forest in the Strawberry Mountains of eastern Oregon, was found to be the largest fungal colony in the world, spanning an area of 3.5 square miles (2,200 acres; 9.1 km 2). [2] [8] This organism is estimated to be some 8,000 years old [8] [18] and may weigh as much as 35,000 tons. [8]
Prototaxites / ˌ p r oʊ t oʊ ˈ t æ k s ɪ t iː z / is an extinct genus of terrestrial fungi dating from the Late Silurian until the Late Devonian periods. [1] [2] Prototaxites formed large trunk-like structures up to 1 metre (3 ft) wide, reaching 8 metres (26 ft) in length, [3] made up of interwoven tubes around 50 micrometres (0.0020 in) in diameter, making it by far the largest land ...
"Humongous Fungus", an individual of the clonal subterranean fungal species Armillaria solidipes in Oregon's Malheur National Forest, is thought to be between 2,000 and 8,500 years old. [48] [49] Apart from its extreme age, it is also thought to be the world's largest organism by area, at 2,384 acres (965 hectares).
The largest living fungus may be a honey fungus [25] of the species Armillaria ostoyae. [26] A mushroom of this type in the Malheur National Forest in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon, U.S. was found to be the largest fungal colony in the world, spanning 8.9 km 2 (2,200 acres) of area. [25] [27] This organism is estimated to be 2,400 years old.
The earliest terrestrial fungus fossils, or at least fungus-like fossils, have been found in South China from around 635 million years ago. The researchers who reported on these fossils suggested that these fungus-like organisms may have played a role in oxygenating Earth's atmosphere in the aftermath of the Cryogenian glaciations. [3]
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Its members are commonly known as the sac fungi or ascomycetes. It is the largest phylum of Fungi, with over 64,000 species. [3] The defining feature of this fungal group is the "ascus" (from Ancient Greek ἀσκός (askós) 'sac, wineskin'), a microscopic sexual structure in which nonmotile spores, called ascospores, are formed.
The largest identified fungal fruit body in the world is a specimen of Phellinus ellipsoideus (formerly Fomitiporia ellipsoidea). The species was discovered in 2008 by Bao-Kai Cui and Yu-Cheng Dai in Fujian Province, China. In 2011, the two of them published details of extremely large fruit body of the species that they had found on Hainan Island