biffvernon wrote:The Daily Mail is, of course, always the preferred source for anything scientific.
Ignoring the sarcasm, I assume you were too busy Mail bashing to read
My name is Dr Dan Eastwood, I am an author on the paper under discussion. As all these things, the messages that grab the headlines from the research don't always reflect the amount of work that went into producing them or the discussion that was put forward in the original article. No one can travel back millions of years, so all understanding is based on theory, what we present is a complimentary story to the current understanding which suggested the loss of coal deposits at the end of the Carboniferous period was due solely to geological processes. The late Devonian and Carboniferous periods saw a time of around 60 million years where wood evolved without a mechanism to break it down – this huge deposition gave us the large coal seams of today. The mechanism fungi use is dependent on oxygen, so until the geology changed from marshy swamps, wood decay fungi would not have evolved. Once they had trees and fungi co-evolved to give us the forests we have today. Sorry no more space..
- Dan , Swansea, 01/7/2012 13:28
To become an extremist, hang around with people you agree with. Cass Sunstein