Abstract
Fungi are no different from other lineages of organisms in that they are not represented in the rock record as a continuous and uninterrupted sequence of fossils. As we learn more about them, however, it becomes obvious that they are an ancient group that must have evolved relatively early in geologic time, perhaps more than 1.5 billion years ago. Despite the lack of body fossil evidence for the earliest organisms that possessed a heterotrophic lifestyle, there are other approaches and techniques that have been used by evolutionary biologists, including those practicing systematics, molecular ecology, genetics, and paleobiology to date certain events in geologic time and thus infer when organisms like fungi first appeared. The use of phylogenetic systematics and the construction and use of molecular clocks have provided hypotheses on the origin of evolutionary lineages of fungi as well as patterns in their evolutionary history.
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