Giant polypore or Dyer's mazegill

The fruit body is made of many fan- or tongue-shaped caps overlapping on a shared base. Each cap is 10 to 30 cm wide and 1 to 3 cm thick, and the whole rosette is usually 50 to 80 cm across, sometimes over a metre, and can weigh tens of kilograms.

Young caps are yellow-brown to cinnamon, later chestnut brown with darker concentric zones and a paler cream margin. The surface is felty, finely fibrous or finely scaly. The margin is wavy, blunt and rounded when young, thinner with age.

The fruit body is round, fan-shaped or a rosette, flat or shallowly funnel-shaped and often lobed, 10 to 30 cm across and 1 to 5 cm thick. It can grow in two or three tiers or as several fused together, and it engulfs needles, twigs and grass.

The surface is velvety or felty, later almost bald, lumpy and concentrically zoned. Young ones are sulphur yellow to orange; then the centre turns rusty to dark brown while the rim stays bright yellow for a while. Old ones are dark brown to almost black, dry and light.

The pore surface is white to cream, later dirty greyish. The pores are small and round, 3 to 5 per millimetre, and the short tubes, 4 to 6 mm deep, run slightly down the base.

The key feature: the pores quickly bruise brown and then black when touched or damaged. The spore print is white.

The pores are large and irregular, 1 to 3 per mm, angular and wavy like a maze. They're yellow, greenish yellow or olive at first, then rusty and dark brown, and darken when touched. The tubes are shallow, usually under 1 cm, and often run down the stem.

The spore print is whitish to pale yellow.

There's no true stem. The caps narrow into short stalk-like bases that merge into a shared, lumpy base, often rising from buried roots.

The stem is short and thick, up to 6 cm long and 2 to 5 cm wide, brown and velvety, central or off-centre and tapering downwards. On stumps the bracket can have no stem.

The flesh is white, sometimes pinkish. It's soft and juicy only when very young, then fibrous and almost leathery. When cut it turns reddish, then black.

Young flesh is soft, spongy, wet and yellow-orange to rusty. Old flesh is dry, fibrous or corky, brittle and very light.

The smell isn't distinctive. The taste is slightly sour, especially in older fruit bodies.

There's no noticeable smell.