Tiny fossils found in mudrock in the barren wilderness of the Canadian Arctic are the remains of the oldest known fungus on Earth, scientists have said.
The minuscule organisms were discovered in shallow water shale, a kind of fine-grained sedimentary rock, in a region south of Victoria island on the edge of the Arctic Ocean.
Tests on the shale, which accumulated over millions of years in a river or lake, revealed that it formed between 900 million and 1 billion years ago in what is now the Northwest Territories.