One of the more subtle effects of the coronavirus pandemic has been the everyday normalization of getting your temperature taken. Whether it’s at th

Mushrooms, Global Warming, and the next Pandemic

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2021-06-24 18:30:08

One of the more subtle effects of the coronavirus pandemic has been the everyday normalization of getting your temperature taken. Whether it’s at the door to your doctor’s office or your local barber shop, the last year has been an all time high of thermometer-forehead interactions. “98.6, you’re good to go!”, “98.6, have a great day sir!”, "98.6, and if you’ll just follow me…” the number has become a sort of greenlight for transactions, familiarly drilled into your head like the chime of a debit card being approved at the grocery store. But have you ever stopped to wonder why our bodies seemed to settle at that temperature?

The answer lies 66 million years ago, in the aftermath of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs. In a theory proposed by Arturo Casadevall of John Hopkins University. (You can read his paper on the subject here). This is the very moment when mammals took the throne from reptiles and became the dominant group of living creatures on earth. In the aftermath of the impact, dust and particles covered the Earth, plunging the world into a cooling cycle similar to a volcanic or nuclear winter. This is thought to have interfered with the photosynthesis of plants world wide, and caused an astounding amount of them to die. Not only did this mean that the large animals who survived the first few years post impact had a much harder time finding food, it also meant that there was a huge amount of biomass available in the soil for decomposers to capitalize on. This caused an absolute explosion in fungal life that can actually be seen in the fossil record.

The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs is famously known to have deposited a layer of iridium rich rock all around the earth called the K-T barrier. No matter where you are digging on Earth, in rock below this iridium deposit layer, you can find cretaceous era dinosaur fossils, and in the rock above it, we find none. Interestingly, right above the K-T barrier, we find some of the highest concentrations of spores anywhere in the fossil record. For years after impact, the dark, cold conditions of the planet allowed fungal organisms big and small to thrive, eating away at the nutrients of dead plants and even threatening to invade and eat alive any animal whose immune system couldn’t fend them off.