Eli5: what makes fungi so fundamentally different from plants and animals, they get their own category?

Question

I mean, the animal part seems intuitive, however I’d like to hear the whole story…

In: 0

Answer 1

I’m going to assume you’ve heard of the “tree of life” – the idea that all life has evolved from a common set of ancestors; and has diverged over time.

Animals, plants, and fungi are all “eucaryotes” – life made up of complex cells with a separate nucleus; but they’re only three branches of the eucaryotic life, and there’s a lot of other forms that are in-between them, evolutionary speaking.

Fungi are actually more closely related to animals than they are to plants – though current estimates are that the most recent common ancestor between animals and fungi lives between 1.1 and 1.5 billion years ago. In contrast, fungi and animals share a common ancestor with plants closer to 1.6 billion years ago.