Editor's choice: Fungi was the first

Unlike plants and animals, fungi rarely leave behind fossils because of their soft, thread-like structure. With so few preserved remains, scientists have long struggled to piece together their evolutionary story.

Using new techniques, researchers from Japan, Spain, Korea, UK and Hungary "concluded that these organisms first appeared between 900 million and 1.4 billion years ago, far earlier than scientists had believed. This suggests that fungi were thriving on Earth hundreds of millions of years before…