Mystery Towers

Bizarre Prototaxites fossils may come from a newly discovered kind of life

- Cody Cottier

A fossil (left) from the towering Prototaxites (artist's concept at right) shows the strange organism's spotty internal structure.

BEFORE TREES CAME ALONG some 400 million years ago, our planet’s landscape was dominated by enigmatic, spire-shaped life-forms that towered more than 25 feet above the ground. Fragments of these trunklike organisms were discovered among fossils collected in 1843. Yet despite more than a century of speculation, scientists have struggled to answer the most basic question about Earth’s original terrestrial giants: What were they?

According to a recent study, that may be because they belonged to a previously unknown branch of life.

The first person to examine this biological misfit did so in 1856, and in 1859 he dubbed it