[HN Gopher] A glob of 99M-year-old amber trapped a zombie fungus...
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A glob of 99M-year-old amber trapped a zombie fungus erupting from
a fly
Author : jackgavigan
Score : 122 points
Date : 2025-06-26 21:25 UTC (4 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| TruffleLabs wrote:
| Zombie fungi pulled from amber is the makings of a movie ;)
| excalibur wrote:
| Sounds like a more promising direction than what the Jurrasic
| Park franchise is doing currently.
| metadat wrote:
| Next iteration: Jurassic Park + The Last of Us
| chakintosh wrote:
| Jurassic in Us
| troupo wrote:
| Jurassic'R'Us
|
| The real journey was all the zombies we infected along the
| way.
| Juliate wrote:
| "Jurassic of Us" has a catch too.
| reactordev wrote:
| The Last Park - because zombie Jurassic creatures is the last
| thing this world needs.
| nosioptar wrote:
| We already have a bunch of Jurassic zombies. Most people
| call them senators.
| reactordev wrote:
| Can't wait for the Cretaceous period...
| pryelluw wrote:
| The Last of _Them_.
|
| Shivers ...
| teeray wrote:
| This gives the whole raptor clicker training Chris Pratt did
| a whole new interpretation.
| shawn_w wrote:
| The Velociraptor With All The Gifts.
| adityaathalye wrote:
| https://bombaylitmag.com/contribution/the-cordyception/
|
| _In my imagined world of Halahala, silent stories have
| occupied prime real estate since 2005. I think of them like
| music without lyrics, jazz-like in the experience. The
| Cordyception is another riff on Halahala's staple theme of
| nature, sustainability and our obsession with a certain ladder.
| An Attenborough documentary led me to these marvellous fungi
| called Cordyceps and the rest is pure Halahala. The fungi
| infect and take over specific insect-hosts - body and mind -
| commanding them to a high vantage point for dispersing spores._
|
| _I swear I drew this before the pandemic_
|
| --Appupen
| HelloUsername wrote:
| "The BBC show we were ripping off (for 'The Last of Us') is
| Planet Earth, where they talked about the cordiceps fungus
| and how it affects insects."
|
| https://venturebeat.com/2013/08/06/the-last-of-us-
| creators-i...
| ge96 wrote:
| Thaw, The Thing (overt), Andromeda Strain, Deep Rising (overt)
| pfdietz wrote:
| These aren't necessarily related to today's Ophiocordyceps
| fungus. Fungi that take control of arthropods and cause them to
| climb to disperse spores have convergently evolved more than
| once, including Arthrophaga myriapodina, which affects
| millipedes, and is in a different Division (the level above
| Class) from Ophiocordyceps.
|
| Convergent evolution is more common than you might think. Trees,
| for example, have separately evolved at least 100 times.
| n_kr wrote:
| > Trees, for example, have separately evolved at least 100
| times.
|
| Can you explain more? Sounds interesting
| jgilias wrote:
| Not OP, but:
|
| https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-
| th...
| pfdietz wrote:
| Thank you for link.
|
| As an aside there: the blog post briefly talks about birds.
| It turns out that membrane wings are much easier to evolve
| than feathered wings. There have been lots of membrane
| winged creatures (including "birds" with membrane wings in
| the Jurassic) but not nearly as many appearances of
| feathered wings.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxA38gH8Gj4
| andrewflnr wrote:
| Trees are barely a firm category of plant at all. It's
| basically just tall plants with woody stems. Plants can gain
| and lose woody stems without too much trouble (relatively
| speaking, over evolutionary time). So any time a plant
| species currently growing soft stems can benefit from being
| really tall, they have a good chance of evolving into
| "trees".
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I've seen rather large cactus turn the base of their stems
| woody and bark clad.
| lupusreal wrote:
| One example is oak trees being more closely related to tulips
| than to pine trees.
|
| (Tulips and oak trees are both angiosperms, flowering plants,
| and share a common angiosperm ancestor. Pine trees on the
| other hand are gymnosperms.)
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| I recently visited the national history museum and finally got
| a sense of the _weirdness_ of prehistoric trees. No bark, a
| green trunk (utilizing photosynthesis), tall like a palm tree.
| I'd love to see something like that now.
| climb_stealth wrote:
| That sounds awesome! The oddest trees I have come across had
| big thorns like roses all over the trunk. Kind of hard to see
| because the trunk is so big, but you'd very quickly notice
| leaning against it.
|
| That was in a botanical garden in Australia. No idea what
| they were or how common they are. Blew my mind.
| galangalalgol wrote:
| Ceiba speciosa maybe? That is a weird tree for sure. I grew
| up where there were wild thorny honeylocust trees. The
| trunks are spotted with dense clusters of branching thorns,
| some of which are 8" long and stiff enough to puncture
| tractor tires. To paraphrase family guy, nature is scary.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Yeah, we've got these in Beersheba (south of Israel). The
| only tree my ten year old won't climb. They've also got
| really interesting cotton-like fruits, though I'm not
| brave enough to taste them.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Sounds like the nightmare tree I had to deal with as
| well. I never did find out what it was. Does the
| honeylocust produce a bunch of red berries? My dad used
| to get mad at me as a teen when I'd be lazy and not pick
| up the fallen limbs from this tree and puncture the
| tractor tires. It was to the sole reason I became very
| proficient at using the tire repair kit.
| Rendello wrote:
| The oddest tree I know of is poplar, which is incredibly
| common around here and is basically considered junk wood.
| Turns out, those individual, fast-growing trees are in fact
| stems of a large underground root system.
|
| One of these trees has 47,000 stems:
|
| > Most agree [...] that Pando encompasses 42.89 hectares
| (106 acres), weighs an estimated 6,000 metric tons (6,600
| short tons) or 13.2 million pounds, and features an
| estimated 47,000 stems, which die individually and are
| replaced by genetically identical stems that are sent up
| from the tree's vast root system, a process known as
| "suckering". The root system is estimated to be several
| thousand years old, with habitat modeling suggesting a
| maximum age of 14,000 years and 16,000 years by the latest
| (2024) estimate.[
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pando_(tree)
| jpfdez wrote:
| Poplars have underground roots, but they are not
| "underground root stems" per se. Their main stem is the
| trunk we see growing above ground.
| Rendello wrote:
| I'm mostly using the terminology from the Pando article.
| The article quotes a "Mitton and Grant" as writing:
|
| > quaking aspen regularly reproduces via a process called
| suckering. An individual stem can send out lateral roots
| that, under the right conditions, send up other erect
| stems; from all above-ground appearances the new stems
| look just like individual trees. The process is repeated
| until a whole stand, of what appear to be individual
| trees, forms. This collection of multiple stems, called
| ramets, all form one, single, genetic individual, usually
| termed a clone.
| Ifkaluva wrote:
| Poplar is considered junk wood? This is news to me. I've
| seen plenty of poplar furniture.
| throwup238 wrote:
| It's too soft to be of much use except the odd piece of
| furniture (for which it is pretty terrible because it
| dents too easily). As a woodworker finishing it also
| sucks because the fibers tear too easily. Its grain
| pattern looks bland at best, it ages poorly, and its
| color is too inconsistent from tree to tree.
|
| That said, it's one of the most stable woods so it
| doesn't warp much which is why it's a popular base
| material for plywood and it's easy on cutting tools. I
| usually only use it for the interior parts of drawers.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It also grows very fast, particularly (per acre) if
| closely spaced, which makes it of interest for biofuels.
|
| https://farm-energy.extension.org/poplar-populus-spp-
| trees-f...
| Rendello wrote:
| It's considered to be a poor firewood around here, as
| well.
| tharkun__ wrote:
| Which is all great for arrow shafts actually. Just may
| need to be thicker than usual.
|
| The Mary Rose shafts seem to mostly have been poplar.
|
| Not that this would be very relevant nowadays but still.
| jorts wrote:
| It's often used as trim that's painted over, as many
| don't consider the wood pretty. I love seeing poplar with
| a wide variety of colors.
| kergonath wrote:
| It's brittle, light and flimsy. It has its uses but is
| not great for furnitures or burning.
| lupusreal wrote:
| My favorite odd tree is the ginkgo. The way the leaves
| are look ancient, like a tree from a fargone era. And it
| is exactly that.
|
| Also the fruit was fun to throw at people when I was a
| kid... Very stinky.
| DHRicoF wrote:
| I don't know if you are talking about Drunken tree (palo
| borracho in spanish) but once playing soccer in a field
| with some of them I ended with around 15 funny parallels
| cuts. Good old times.
| williamdclt wrote:
| > visited the national history museum
|
| what nation?
| kzrdude wrote:
| Well, bamboo comes to mind as a really weird tree. It's not a
| tree, but it's the size of one..
| pif wrote:
| > prehistoric trees
|
| I suppose you are actually talking of a time preceding
| prehistory by a fair lot!
| dylan604 wrote:
| How can something precede history. Isn't that just older
| history?
| kergonath wrote:
| Conventionally, History starts with written records.
| Everything that came before is prehistoric. It's useful
| as a concept when discussion groups of humans in the last
| 10-odd millennia, but not really for things that are a
| couple of millions years old.
| marcellus23 wrote:
| which museum? Do you mean the Natural History Museum in New
| York?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| Closest you can come today is probably a tree fern. I've got
| a _Dicksonia antarctica_ in my living room under grow lights.
| It 's a neat plant.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| Cycads are pretty old
| dpc050505 wrote:
| Pot plants have no bark and a green trunk and can reach
| heights of like 12 ft.
| pabs3 wrote:
| My favourite tree evolution thing is the forests in the
| Galapagos being evolved from dandelion seeds blown in on the
| wind from South America.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Fascinating. Do you have a link to that, or the name of that
| species?
| h1c wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalesia
| mystified5016 wrote:
| Mullberry plants are weird. They're happy to exist as a small
| shrub or a 60ft tree, depending on how they're cultivated.
|
| One of the largest trees I've ever personally seen was a
| mullberry on some long-abandoned land adjoining mine. But
| they're also a bush?
| downrightmike wrote:
| Fungi likely precedes the Dinos by 100's millions of years
| usrbinbash wrote:
| _" You want Zombie Apocalypse?! Because THAT's how you get Zombie
| Apocalypse!"_
| nervousvarun wrote:
| Everyone is understandably referencing the Last of Us but Common
| Side Effects deserves a mention as well.
|
| I for one welcome our new mushroom overlords.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Side_Effects
| WediBlino wrote:
| "Bomb the city and everything in it"
| dmd wrote:
| Did a fungus write this? That'll just spread it wider. (cf. The
| Genius Plague by David Walton)
| WediBlino wrote:
| https://youtu.be/3hRYHX8bLVA?si=Jz03JZO1gTyjAQuH
| davidpfarrell wrote:
| When you realize the fungus' primary intent was to convince the
| fly to land in amber ...
| cwmoore wrote:
| ...and wait for us at this moment...
| bluepuma77 wrote:
| "Cold Storage" by American screenwriter David Koepp comes to
| mind, a comedy splatter novel. I don't usually read such books,
| but this one was funny and entertaining.
| jackgavigan wrote:
| Apparently set to become a movie, starring Liam Neeson:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_Storage_(film)
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