Feb 20, 2025
Here's a little pixel art gif I made of Thuchomyces lichenoides, a bizarre fossil organism known from roughly 2.8 billion year old (around the Meso/Neoarchean boundary) rocks in Witwatersrand, South Africa. They have been suggested to be fungi, but they are older than most commonly accepted dates for the origin of fungi, and are about 400 million years older than the next oldest suggested fungi.
The environment they were found in apparently has evidence of being a sand-blasted desert with occasional streams, which is what I have shown here. I've also included mountains because I'm think there were some mountains near Witwatersrand around this time.
