Fungus among us.

Byline: Zarrar Khuhro

IT is bright yellow and has 720 sexes (imagine the preferred pronouns for that, if you will). It has no nervous system or brain but yet is capable of solving problems like navigating through a maze (thanks to algorithms embedded in its biochemistry) and it can learn from experience and also transmit that knowledge. If it merges with another of its species, the newly formed creature possesses the knowledge of both halves.

It also has no stomach, eyes or mouth but can seek out and digest its favourite food which, you'll be glad to know, isn't human flesh but oatmeal. You'll also be relieved to hear that its maximum speed is about four centimetres an hour so if this creature changes its mind regarding its diet there's a good chance you'll be able to run away.

Oh, and did I mention that it is also functionally immortal? The only things it doesn't like are light and drought but in the worst-case scenario it can just go to sleep for a few years or even decades and wake up once the danger has passed.

It has no stomach, eyes or mouth but can seek out and digest its favourite food.

Because this sounds like something out of a science fiction movie, the people at the Paris zoological park where this creature is exhibited are calling it 'the blob' in a nod to the classic 1950s horror movie, though its actual name, which translates to 'the many-headed slime', may be even cooler. While scientists admit that they 'don't actually know what it is' they are pretty sure it's not an animal or a plant, but may well be some form of fungus.

If so, it belongs to a truly ancient family; in 2014, scientists digging in the Canadian arctic found a billion-year-old fossil of a fungus they named Ourasphaira giraldae. When thinking about the implications of its age, please note that the first dinosaurs only appeared a mere 270 million years ago and that this discovery basically upends everything we thought we knew about how life on earth evolved.

Until now we thought that fungi and plants acted mostly together to colonise the surface of the earth, but given that the oldest plant fossils only date back some 470m years, this means that the fungi were first. This, in turn, means that animals (closely linked to fungi in the 'tree of life') may also have appeared on earth far earlier than we imagined.

While we are familiar with the descendants of this ancient fungus: mould, yeasts and mushrooms (magic and otherwise), it may come as a surprise that it is...