Lichen Timeline

Lichen 18

1729 Micheli describes lichens in Nova Plantarum Genera Pier Antonio Micheli The Florentine botanist Pier Antonio Micheli describes and illustrates lichens in detail in Nova Plantarum Genera, including their fruiting bodies.
1753 Linnaeus files lichens among the algae Species Plantarum In Species Plantarum Carl Linnaeus puts about 80 lichen species into one genus, Lichen, and places it among the algae.
1803 Acharius publishes Methodus Lichenum Erik Acharius, father of lichenology The Swedish botanist Erik Acharius splits the single genus Lichen into many genera, founding lichenology as a field of its own.
1866 Nylander sees lichens vanish from Paris Lichens as a gauge of air William Nylander notes that lichens die out on trees in central Paris and calls them a measure of healthy air. By 1896 the Jardin du Luxembourg has lost all of its lichens.
1867 Schwendener proposes the dual hypothesis A lichen is a fungus plus an alga At a meeting of the Swiss natural science society in Rheinfelden, Simon Schwendener argues that a lichen is a fungus living with an alga. Most lichenologists, Nylander among them, reject the idea for decades.
1877 Frank coins Symbiotismus Albert Bernhard Frank Studying crustose lichens, the German botanist Albert Bernhard Frank coins the word Symbiotismus for the regular living together of different organisms.
1878 De Bary defines symbiosis Die Erscheinung der Symbiose In a lecture printed in 1879, Anton de Bary defines symbiosis as the living together of unlike organisms, with lichens as a prime example. The term spreads across biology.
1939 Thomas grows a lichen from its partners First resynthesis Eugen Thomas reports the first successful resynthesis of a lichen from separately cultured fungus and alga, hard experimental proof of the dual nature.
1950 Beschel proposes lichenometry Dating rock surfaces by lichen size Roland Beschel proposes dating moraines and other exposed rock by the size of the slow-growing lichens on them, a method now called lichenometry.
1970 Hawksworth and Rose publish the lichen pollution scale Lichens as sulphur dioxide monitors In Nature, David Hawksworth and Francis Rose publish a ten-point scale that estimates sulphur dioxide pollution in England and Wales from the lichens growing on trees.
1981 Lichens return to London Cleaner air As sulphur dioxide levels fall, lichens that were extinct or very rare around London in 1970 spread back across the city, a survey in Nature shows.
1986 Chernobyl fallout poisons reindeer lichen Radioactive caesium in the Sami pastures Reindeer lichen soaks up caesium from the Chernobyl fallout, and reindeer eat it all winter. About three quarters of Swedish reindeer meat from 1986 to 1987 is rejected, and Norway raises its limit for reindeer meat to keep Sami herding alive.
1995 Oldest fossil lichen found in the Rhynie chert Winfrenatia Thomas Taylor and colleagues describe a lichen with cyanobacteria from the 400-million-year-old Rhynie chert in Scotland. The genus is named Winfrenatia in 1997.
2005 A 600-million-year-old lichen-like partnership Doushantuo Formation In Science, Xunlai Yuan, Shuhai Xiao and Thomas Taylor report fungal threads wrapped around algae-like cells in marine rocks in southern China, about 600 million years old.
2005 Lichens survive open space ESA Foton-M2 mission Two lichen species ride outside the Foton-M2 satellite, exposed to vacuum and full solar UV for 14.6 days. Back on Earth they photosynthesise as before.
2016 A third partner in the lichen Basidiomycete yeasts Toby Spribille and colleagues find basidiomycete yeasts in the outer layer of many common lichens on six continents, breaking the one-fungus, one-alga model.
2019 DNA dates lichens after vascular plants Molecular clocks A DNA study of lichen fungi and algae led from the Field Museum finds no support for lichens before the first vascular plants, challenging the idea that they led life onto land.
2025 Spongiophyton confirmed as a lichen 410 million years old Synchrotron imaging of the Devonian fossil Spongiophyton from Brazil shows fungal and algal networks and a chitin signal. Lichens were widespread 410 million years ago and helped build the first soils.