Fungus or Algae?
What effect do you think this will have, or what effect has it had on the Permian-Triassic debate? It’s surprised me how over the last few years, how quickly the idea that the fungal remains could be algal has been adopted. I never thought the data was that convincing, and it’s nice to see it being brought back [into] the debate. It’s clearly an organism that’s responding to a change in environmental conditions. We don’t see this sort of fungal spike anywhere else in the geological record, so it’s important that we try to understand its origin, its lifestyle, and its relationships via extinction because there clearly is one. It’s a remarkable event, and it’s tied with all sorts of other geochemical signals that also go crazy at the end of the Permian as well. I think its demise as an environmental indicator was overstated. So it’s nice to have it back reinstated where it belongs. Have you received any reaction to the study so far? We’ve had lots of media interest. Scientifically, no on
