A friend of mine is taking a class on how to identify wild mushrooms (eatable, whoops you're dead, who changed the color of the sky, etc...).

He mentioned that a class is required, because identification of a mushroom is based on its looks, scent, and texture. I propose a popup-book style fieldguide that has polyurethane gel artificial looking-feeling-smelling mushroom replicas that one can reference.
-- stormo, Aug 11 2003

But some look like this! http://www.nara-edu.../photo/h-suppon.JPG
[squeak, Oct 04 2004]

I like this. It’s not intuitively obvious which fungi you can or can not eat. - This provides prior experience.

[Rods], you might want to stay away from the psilocybin shrooms... or not.
-- Shz, Aug 11 2003


In that example I’d say the teens are the drug years.
-- Shz, Aug 11 2003


How do you stop the book smelling like a stinkhorn when you close it. May attract flies. Also carries the danger that a popup picture of this mushroom could lead to the book being mistaken for a very different type of book (latin name Phallus sp.). Linky.
-- squeak, Aug 12 2003


[squeak] Actually, nearly all mushrooms are poisonous to flies, they naturally avoid them. In fact, an old fashion fly trap was to spread sugar or honey on some mushrooms, thereby masking the scent of the mushroom. The flies would then feed on the mushroom and die.

As for the smell, I think you are missing the point that the foam mushrooms will be artificially scented with the fresh scent of each mushroom. They would not rot or begin to stink, because they are not real. (Just as a scratch-and-sniff strawberry sticker does not eventually smell like rotten strawberries – it’s not real fruit.)
-- stormo, Aug 19 2003



random, halfbakery