Who The Hell Was This?
It was a bonnie morning 410 million years ago in what are now the Rhynie chert fossil beds in Scotland. The mists had begun to lift and swirl over the landscape, where hot springs burbled, lichen papered over rocks, and worms slithered as only worms can. Here, almost all life stayed close to the ground. The second-tallest organism at the time, a plant called Cooksonia, grew to a few centimeters at most. This made Prototaxites, an organism with some species that towered above these landscapes at heights of up to 26 feet, an actual behemoth.
Prototaxites was a strange sort of life form. It had no branches, leaves, flowers, fruits, nor a discernable root system. Instead, it resembled a beautiful sausage sprouting from the ground. In this way Prototaxites was ahead of its time: undeniably phallic in a time long before phalluses existed.
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