Archaeology
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Archaeology or archeology[a] is the study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landscapes.
Archaeology has various goals, which range from understanding culture history to reconstructing past lifeways to documenting and explaining changes in human societies through time.
The discipline involves surveying, excavation, and eventually analysis of data collected, to learn more about the past. In broad scope, archaeology relies on cross-disciplinary research. Read more...
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My guess is that it's a relative of red algae and plants/Viridiplantae, but not quite either.
At least one source mentions it produces lignin or something similar; lignin is present in both clades I mentioned. However since it doesn't do photosynthesis we can rule out belonging to those clades, I genuinely don't think evolution would favour ditching phycoerythrin or chlorophyll, so odds are it never developed either.
There are plants and algae that don't do photosynthesis (although I think they still have vestigial chloroplast?)
Non-photosynthetic plants (like ghost pipes) are typically rather small parasites of other plants, that for some reason lost access to good sunlight (such as being so deep in a forest that other plants call dibs on those yummy photons). I don't see how it would be the case here, given the fossil in question is 8m tall, and apparently it predates actual (Viridiplantae) trees. And I think the same reasoning applies to a potential Rhodophyta = red alga.
Because of that I think it's way more likely the taxon in question is related to both, but part of neither. And the reason it's heterotrophic (as per Wiki article) is because it never developed something similar to photosynthesis on first place.
In fact the size is bugging me. Why did it grow so big? Plants usually do this because they're trying to outcompete other plants, but that doesn't make sense here.