If there is a rule in biology, I can think about how it does not apply to fungi,” Anne Pringle, a mycologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, said earlier this year. “They challenge our preconceptions of how biology works.” Neither plant nor animal (though closer to the latter in evolutionary terms), fungi are everywhere.
By Nicola Twilley
Geastrum britannicum, one of 2015’s newly confirmed fungi, was previously dismissed as a variant of another species. Photograph by Dawn and Jim Langiewicz. Image sourced from The New Yorker. Available at: https://media.newyorker.com