This Fossil Is Rewriting the Story of How Plants Spread across the Planet

The first plants to get a foothold on land are a mystery, because there are few fossils — except for Spongiophyton. But the enigmatic lifeform has been fiendishly difficult to classify. Now a beautifully preserved specimen has revealed itself as one of the oldest lichens in Earth’s history, showing that these organisms were already common more than 410 million years ago. “It’s a major shift in how we view the complexity of life’s first steps onto land,” says palaeobiologist and study co-author Bruno Becker-Kerber. Spongiophyton “likely weathered rocks, stabilised sediments, cycled nutrients and contributed to the formation of protosoils just before forests developed”.