AP BIOLOGY

Detailed explanation-1: -Fungi were some of the first complex life forms on land, mining rocks for mineral nourishment, slowly turning them into what would become soil. In the Late Ordovician era, they formed a symbiotic relationship with liverworts, the earliest plants.

Detailed explanation-2: -The earliest life forms we know of were microscopic organisms (microbes) that left signals of their presence in rocks about 3.7 billion years old. The signals consisted of a type of carbon molecule that is produced by living things.

Detailed explanation-3: -Fungi are among the most widely distributed organisms on Earth and are of great environmental and medical importance. Many fungi are free-living in soil or water; others form parasitic or symbiotic relationships with plants or animals.

Detailed explanation-4: -The researchers found that land plants had evolved on Earth by about 700 million years ago and land fungi by about 1, 300 million years ago-much earlier than previous estimates of around 480 million years ago, which were based on the earliest fossils of those organisms.