Strange case of the buried brain …
It is always a pleasure to stumble upon something new, even if, at the moment of discovery, you have no inkling that it will later reveal itself as a new county record. That was precisely the case during a day spent in 2016 searching for fungi with my good friend Colin Knight.
In its native home of New Zealand, the brain-like Scarlet Berry Truffle Paurocotylis pila grows beneath Podocarpus and has evolved to mimic the plant’s fruit. Its spores are carried by large birds, which consume the fallen fruits and are artfully deceived into eating the fungus as well. Taxus baccata, the tree beneath which our specimen was found, bears fruits remarkably similar in form, and both it and Podocarpus rely on birds for dispersal. It is therefore quite plausible that P. pila has discovered a parallel ecological niche on the far side of the world. Many Antipodean fungi are known to have co-evolved with large birds, adopting truffle-like forms and fruit-mimicking colours, yet evidence already suggests that some of these species are evolving ‘back’ toward non-truffle forms following the extinction of their dispersal partners, such as Dinornis, the Giant Moa.
P. pila remains a scarce find in Britain, with most records originating from northern England and Scotland. The accompanying images show several of the specimens we observed pushing up through the bare soil. My thanks to Nick Aplin for species determination and for the photomicrograph, which shows the distinctive large, spherical spores.
References:
http://www.gbif.org/species/2593545 [Accessed, 7th December 2025].
https://data.nbn.org.uk/Taxa/NBNSYS0000019686 [Accessed, 7th December 2025].