Provides information about how the fungus caused the death of large trees in different parts of the planet. The trunk is at least 260 million years old, and belongs to the genus Dadoxylon. At that time there was a crisis of diversity much worse than the dinosaurs, according to a paleontologist. The fossil trunk exhibited to the public from this week in Cuenca first registers in Europe an interaction between fungus and plant, dated at the end of the Permian (260 million years ago), and which helps scientists to explain the greatest extinction of diversity in the history of the planet. The study of this issue, of the genus Dadoxylon, provides information on fungi attack which caused the death of large trees in different points of the planet at the end of the Permian period, when there was greater extinction animals and plants on the Earth, as explained by the paleontologist Francisco Ortega.
The good fossil preservation attacking fungus and trunk that houses it is helping experts to explain how environmental degradation is produced at that time, makes 260 million years has clarified Ortega. Paleontologist has pointed out that at that time there was a crisis of still much worse than the dinosaur diversity. Ortega has explained that many works are focused to analyze under what conditions the environmental deterioration of the planet occurred at that time, and in this sense the fossil trunk of basin provides interesting data. The existence of trunks so large, very well preserved, with fungal attacks, which we know now in the ELMS, provides some information of the interaction between the fungus and the plant. The workpiece, 6.2 meters long and weighing six tons, was rescued in 1994 of its archaeological site of Landete, in the mountainous area of Cuenca, where it was being vandalized. In fact, Francisco Ortega argues in a very short time the trunk lost almost a meter in length. The paleontologist Mercedes Llandres has been responsible for the restoration and conservation of the log Since this week is on display in the garden of Ars Natura, the interpretation of the nature of Castilla – La Mancha Center located in Cuenca. During the presentation of the fossil, Llandres explained that the applied chemical treatments will allow to be outdoors and not suffer any damage. Trunk lacks bark and shows the secondary leno devoid of growth rings, which suggests that he lived in a warm climate with monsoon. Its anatomy is similar to the araucaria angustifolia, a conifer that grows in South America and the North of Portugal and Galicia.