That is so cool. It looks like the kind of mushrooms in illustrations for kids books or in fantasy games.
Because a lot of the kids books I grew up with were from Europe, and I didn't live there, I'd see these depictions of nature that never resembled the biome that I lived in. For years I always assumed the environments depicted were just part of the illustration style and magical setting, and they didn't exist like that in real life. This bolete is for sure something that popped up in those illustrations that I thought was fictional or stylised.
The internet keeps showing me, even after all this time, that the illustrations were pretty damn accurate and that the real world is the magical setting.
Haha, I actually have. They're an introduced species here that may well be 'pest' status for how well it has acclimated. No giant twisty chunky boletes though!
I totally get that, it’s the same form me! Before I started being interested in and actually looking for these boletes, I had no idea. These depictions of big brown mushrooms growing between moss somewhere in the woods were always more of a fantasy thing for me.
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