How an ancestral fungus may have influenced coal formation
Thursday, June 28, 2012 - 14:00
in Earth & Climate
The fossilized remains of plants that lived from around 360 to 300 million years ago, coal generated nearly half of the roughly four trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity consumed in the United States in 2010. An international team of scientists proposes that the evolution of fungi capable of breaking down the polymer lignin in plants may have played a key role in ending the development of coal deposits, contributing to the end of the Carboniferous period.