Abstract
The middle Miocene Climate Optimum (MMCO) was the warmest interval of the last 23 million years and is one of the best analogs for proposed future climate change scenarios. Fungi play a key role in the terrestrial carbon cycle as dominant decomposers of plant debris, and through their interactions with plants and other organisms as symbionts, parasites, and endobionts. Thus, their study in the fossil record, especially during the MMCO, is essential to better understand biodiversity changes and terrestrial carbon cycle dynamics in past analogous environments, as well as to model future ecological and climatic scenarios. The fossil record also offers a unique long-term, large-scale dataset to evaluate fungal assemblage dynamics across long temporal and spatial scales, providing a better understanding of how ecological factors influenced assemblage development through time. In this study, we assessed the fungal diversity and community composition recorded in two geological sections from the middle Miocene from the coal mines of Thailand and Slovakia. We used presence-absence data to quantify the fungal diversity of each locality. Spores and other fungal remains were identified to modern taxa whenever possible; laboratory codes and fossil names were used when this correlation was not possible. This study represents the first of its kind for Thailand, and it expands existing work from Slovakia. Our results indicate a total of 281 morphotaxa. This work will allow us to use modern ecological data to make inferences about ecosystem characteristics and community dynamics for the studied regions. It opens new horizons for the study of past fungal diversity based on modern fungal ecological analyses. It also sheds light on how global variations in fungal species richness and community composition were affected by different climatic conditions and under rapid increases of temperature in the past to make inferences for the near climatic future.
Highlights
Fungi play key roles in the forest environment and are essential drivers of nutrient cycling in peat-producing forested wetlands (Heitman et al, 2018)
A total of 637 fungal spore specimens were recorded in the samples from Thailand and Slovakia (Supplementary Table 1 and Figures 3–5)
These were grouped into 281 morphotaxa, based on detailed morphological comparisons, of which 151 were found only in Thailand, 93 only in Slovakia, and 37 in both Thailand and Slovakia
Summary
Fungi play key roles in the forest environment and are essential drivers of nutrient cycling in peat-producing forested wetlands (Heitman et al, 2018). While the needed time to produce such datasets is scarce, the paleo-sciences provide a lens with which we can build predictive models using fossil fungal assemblages These assemblages occur in two major forms (Taylor et al, 2015): macrofossils, which may preserve significant portions of the fungal organism in exquisite detail, and microfossils, often fragmented or representative of a single phase of the life cycle of fungus, typically the spore, including the sporangiospore, conidium, ascospore, and basidiospore, or other structures such as hyphae, conidiophores, rhizoids, etc. Fossil fungi in deep-time have been identified using an artificial classification scheme based on morphological descriptions that have little to no correlation with modern taxa (O’Keefe et al, 2021). Recent advances in training and collaborations with modern mycologists are permitting the discipline to move past this limitation and to recognize members of modern families and genera in the fossil record (Nuñez Otaño et al, 2017, 2021; O’Keefe, 2017; Shumilovskikh et al, 2017; Pound et al, 2019; Bianchinotti et al, 2020; Loughlin et al, 2021)
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