A group of living things
Fungi and animals
Opisthokonta
Mushrooms are your distant cousins.
Its members' last common ancestor lived about 1.3 billion years ago.
You are part of this group. See how.
Mushrooms are your distant cousins. Fungi and animals sit together on one great branch of life, so a toadstool is much closer kin to you than it is to any plant. That surprises many people, and many scientists even classed fungi as plants until the mid-1900s.
Neither side can make food from sunlight. Instead both live off other living things or their dead remains. Fungi soak up tiny dissolved bits of food through their surface and help recycle nutrients for other living things to use. Animals take food in by eating living things or dead remains, from plants to meat.
They share hidden family likenesses too. Both store spare energy in the same form. The walls of fungal cells are toughened with the same material found in the hard outer cases of insects and crabs. You would never guess it by looking at them.
A tail at the back
Human sperm cells still swim with a single tail at the back.
A fungus as big as a town
One honey fungus in Oregon spreads across about 965 hectares of forest soil, as big as a small town. It is the largest known fungus by area and one of the heaviest known living things.
Tiny cousins that trap bacteria
Choanoflagellates are tiny single-celled relatives of animals. Each swims and feeds with one tail ringed by a collar of strands that trap bacteria. By eating huge numbers of bacteria they help move carbon through ocean food chains, and krill that feed whales eat them in turn.