Odontoid Discovery!

A few days ago, one of my work colleagues was busy selling trees when a man slithered down the bank behind the cabin.
 ‘Have a look at this,’ he said.
A couple of yards up the bank, nestling against one of the many rotting tree stumps there was a single, small, brownish, wet ear of fungus. Barely visible from the path and as non-descript as a soggy crisp it did not attract a second glance. Unless you were a mycologist of course. Which he was.
Close up, the upper surface was in fact subtly crinkled with a slight pimply speckle, more like a delicate amphibian’s skin than a plant, but it was the underside that made it special. Instead of rows of linear gills, these were serrated into spikes, dentine white- a tooth fairy’s dream. It was as unexpected as finding a grotto of stalactites hanging under a council house porch.
It appears it is one of the ‘toothed’ fungi, previously all lumped under one name by Linnaeus as the hydnoids, but now DNA dispersed to other genera. Most are quite uncommon and often are associated with old woodland, so finding it in a commercial forest was very exciting.  Sadly, probably because there are over 900 species, no specific name was forthcoming. But I looked up some of the others associated in the old genera – Lions mane, Jelly Cat’s tongue, Taiga tooths, and all are strange and wonderful in form.  

 It's a subject you could really get your teeth into.