LIFE, BUT NOT AS WE KNOW IT…

MUSHROOMS ON MARS

t is rare that a scientific paper makes tabloid headlines, but in May a paper from the peer reviewed journal claiming the discovery of fungi growing on Mars did just that. Despite first appearances, this was not the latest revelation from the NASA Perseverance rover currently searching for life on Mars, but the result of analysis of publicly available images taken by the Opportunity rover that was operational from 2003 to 2018. The paper’s authors, Rhawn Gabriel Joseph, an independent researcher, Dr Xinli Wei, of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Dr Rudolph Schild from Harvard-Smithsonian scrutinised a sequence of photographs the rover had taken of small spherical structures on Mars’s surface and came to the conclusion that the changes they observed were indicative of the growth cycle of fungi and that the objects’ morphology was also consistent with that of fungi. In their paper “Fungi on Mars? Evidence of Growth and Behavior From Sequential Images” (which can be found on Researchgate: ) they claim that the