Scientists Puzzled by Giant Ancient Life Forms

Scientists are suggesting there may be a brand new type of life — or, at least, that one existed back in the day. In a new, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, scientists from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland argue that the massive and mysterious tubelike fossils known as "prototaxites" deserve their own life form classification because, basically, they're too weird to belong to any other. Since their discovery in the 1800s, prototaxites have long been a head-scratcher and a point of contention for scientists who to this day cannot figure out their nature. Fossils of this bizarre organism, which lived some 400 million years ago, were initially thought to be the remains of rotted trees, complete with the fungi that assisted their decomposition inside them. In 1872, however, a ticked-off Canadian scientist named William Carruthers trashed that concept and suggested, against scientific convention, that the name prototaxites, which translates to "first yew," be changed to "nematophycus ... Read full article.