Dry Mushrooms on Rotten Wood - 21 December 2024

We recently found these mushrooms on a piece of old wood. I’m not sure what sort of wood it was but it was very light in weight and light in colour. The wood was clearly rotten and it had these 3 fungi that looked a bit like fossils. They had a paper-like appearance with a lot of texture. To me the whole piece looked a bit like a sculpture.

I was keen to find out what type of mushroom they were. So after taking a few photos I trusted Google Lens to guide me in my quest for further knowledge.

_{Above and below are close-ups of the same mushrooms.}

Just going by the shape of the mushrooms and ruling out the many other (distracting ) options I found on Google Lens which I then followed up on the Net, I think this may be a Sistotrema Confluens. I base my possible answer mainly on the ‘stem’ that comes out of the piece of wood. These fungi were dry and I’m not sure whether or not they’d been totally ‘nibbled’ by wildlife so this shape may be a left-over rather than an original shape. If they’d been fresh, they’d probably looked like this photo.

Apparently the common name for this type of mushroom is Aromatic Earthfan which is a very interesting name that makes me wonder a) is it supposed to look like a fan, and b) how aromatic it is when fresh.

As I’m absolutely no expert in this field and as I was unable to see these mushrooms when they were fresh it’s hard to tell at this stage if I'm correct. Also when I looked into where they grow I found out that they’re supposed to grow on pine tree trunks. The wood is very rotten but it doesn’t look like pine to me.

I’ll leave this as a mystery for now. Perhaps you know.

Thank you for reading !