The Silurian became an era of rapid conquest of land by plants and animals.

At the beginning of the period, most of the land was lifeless desert. Only around bodies of water - on the shores of seas, near rivers and lakes, could one encounter individual living beings. At the end of the previous Ordovician period, the first plants - mosses - appeared on land. Also, strands of ancient fungi and numerous bacteria inhabited between the particles of the earliest soil. These organisms were too small to significantly change the primitive landscape.

But one group of living beings, also appearing at the very end of the Ordovician, became much more noticeable. These were the mysterious prototaxites (Prototaxites). They resembled huge 8-meter pillars, toppled to the ground. Paleontologists who first discovered these fossilized organisms initially took them for tree trunks, but it turned out they were incredibly whimsical forms of fossil fungi. For a long time, debates raged as to whether the...