Skeptic Review

A plate from James Sowerby’s Coloured Figures of English Fungi or Mushrooms. 

The stinkhorn mushroom is not only known for its appearance, but its foul smell. The sticky brown slime at the top of the stalk smells like rotting flesh which attracts flies that then spread the spores. At full growth, it is 4-8 inches tall.

Stinkhorns grow throughout the world but prefer tropical climates.

An excerpt from Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher Ryan offers this little anecdote about Charles Darwin’s daughter and the stinkhorn mushroom:

Etty’s prim enthusiasm for stamping out anything sexual wasn’t limited to the written word. She waged a bizarre little war against the so-called stinkhorn mushroom (Phallus ravenelii) that still pops up in the woods around the Darwin estate. Apparently, the similarity of the mushroom to the human penis was a bit much for her. As Etty’s niece (Charles’s granddaughter) recalled years later, “Aunt Etty … armed with a basket and a pointed stick, and wearing a special hunting cloak and gloves,” would set out in search of the mushrooms. At the end of the day, Aunt Etty “burn[ed them] in the deepest secrecy on the drawing room fire with the door locked—because of the morals of the maids.”

Fun fact: A related fungus called the dog stinkhorn is also known as “the devil’s dipstick.”

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