New ancient giant fungus discovered in China
· Toronto Sun
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A new giant fungus, whose evolutionary lineage dates back to roughly 65 million years ago — around the time dinosaurs went extinct — has been discovered by scientists in China.
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The fungus, named Dianjunus rex or “D-rex,” produces finger-like fruiting bodies that can reach up to 20 inches high (about the width of a standard pillow) and weigh up to 4.9 pounds, making it the largest known among the phylum Ascomycota, which is a diverse group of fungi containing over 64,000 species.
“This remarkable species represents a new fungal family, Dianjunaceae, and provides a rare window into the evolution of extreme fungal body forms,” said Dr. Indunil C. Senanayake, an associate professor at the Kunming Institute of Botany in China and corresponding author of the new study, published in the journal Frontiers in Fungal Biology .
“The discovery illustrates how much fungus biodiversity remains to be discovered in East Asian forests,” she added.
Scientists discovered the giant fungus in 2024 while doing fieldwork in the forests of Yunnan, China — a region known for its fungal diversity.
Farmers first found peculiar fungus
According to a recent ScienceNews report, local farmers told the scientists about the peculiar fungus’ fleshy, whitish, finger-like fruiting bodies called stromata.
They provided them with photos, Senanayake told ScienceNews.
The farmers reportedly even took a bite of the fungus to see if it was edible.
Senanayake and her colleagues went to the location and found the fungus’ stromata growing from the woody roots of Chinese cork oak trees.
The researchers then took samples of the fungus and compared them with those from other fungi, and found that they were looking at something so different it wasn’t just a new species, it represented an entirely new genus and family.
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How scientists pinned its origins to extinction event
The scientists also performed a “molecular clock” analysis of the new species’ DNA, comparing it to the genome of hundreds of fungi with known evolutionary age. This led them to estimate that the new fungus emerged around 65 million years ago — about one million years after the mass extinction event that wiped out non-avian dinosaurs.
The timing of Dianjunus rex’s emergence suggests that the mass die-off may have produced favourable conditions for the fungus’ ancestors.
“For wood-associated decomposing fungi, such environmental disruption may have created new ecological opportunities,” Senanayake said.
As for why the fungus can become so large, Senanayake believes it may have something to do with reproductive adaptations its ancestors made growing above the forest floor so the wind can carry its spores across dense forests.
“However, such a large structure requires substantial energy investment, suggesting that this strategy likely evolved only where the ecological benefits outweighed the costs,” Senanayake added.