An international team of paleontologists led by Dr George Poinar of Oregon State University has found a grass spikelet and an ergot-like parasitic fungus preserved in a 100-million-year-old piece of amber from Myanmar.
This grass spikelet from the middle Cretaceous is the earliest grass specimen ever discovered, and is covered on its tip by the parasite ergot. Image credit: Oregon State University.
Ergot has played roles as a medicine, a toxin, and a hallucinogen; been implicated in everything from disease epidemics to the Salem witch trials; and more recently provided the drug LSD.
Apparently both ergot and the grasses that now form most of the diet for the human race evolved together.
“It seems like ergot has been involved with animals and humans almost forever, and now we know that this fungus literally dates back to the earliest evolution of grasses,” said Dr Poinar, who is the first author of a paper accepted for publication in the journal Palaeodiversity.
The newly-discovered amber fossil dates about 100 million years ago to the middle Cretaceous, when the land was still dominated by dinosaurs and conifers, but the earliest flowering plants, grasses and small mammals were beginning to evolve.
“This is an important discovery that helps us understand the timeline of grass development, which now forms the basis of the human food supply in such crops as corn, rice or wheat.”
“But it also shows that this parasitic fungus may have been around almost as long as the grasses themselves, as both a toxin and natural hallucinogen.”
“There’s no doubt in my mind that it would have been eaten by sauropod dinosaurs, although we can’t know what exact effect it had on them.”
The fungus in this specimen was named Palaeoclaviceps parasiticus. It’s very similar to the fungus Claviceps, commonly known as ergot.
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George Poinar et al. 2015. Palaeoclaviceps parasiticus sp. nov. Palaeodiversity
