Milestones in order. This is history, not a weekly activity grid.
- Leeuwenhoek's yeasts
- Micheli's spores
- Pasteur on fermentation
- Fleming's mould
- Whittaker's five kingdoms
- Yeast genome
- White-nose & bats
- Batrachochytrium crises
Darker cells mean a higher score for this topic on that metric.
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Quick answers
Where should I start with Fungi?
Read Identity → How they live → Body & health, then use compare rails.
Is this page advice for Fungi?
Public-health education — not a care plan, prescription, or outbreak briefing.
What does the local lens add?
It names everyday desks for Tree of microbes before English norms look universal.
Are the scores a ranking of Fungi?
No — editorial 0–100 browsing aids inside this atlas only.
How do I compare Fungi to neighbours?
Use related cards and best-of / quiz rails after the first three chapters.
Which chapter is densest?
How they live and Body & health carry mechanisms; skim Identity first.
People farmed yeasts for millennia before they had a kingdom name. Linnaeus stuffed fungi into plants; Whittaker (1969) gave them their own kingdom in popular textbooks.
Molecular phylogeny then moved them beside animals and split 'phycomycetes' into several real clades.
Timeline
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek sketches globules in beer — among the first microbial fungi seen.
Pier Antonio Micheli shows mushrooms arise from spores, not spontaneous mud.
Louis Pasteur ties living yeast to alcoholic fermentation, attacking purely chemical vitalisms of the day.
Alexander Fleming notes a Penicillium zone on staphylococci — later Florey and Chain make a medicine.
Robert Whittaker popularises Fungi as a separate kingdom in ecology teaching.
S. cerevisiae is fully sequenced — a eukaryotic model that still trains genetics students.
Pseudogymnoascus destructans devastates North American bats, showing fungal pathogens reshape wildlife.
Chytrid fungi are recognised as drivers of global amphibian declines — a conservation emergency.
Fungal history is kitchens, forests and hospitals — not only a Petri dish anecdote.
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