Giant polypore or Oak bracket

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 has no stem and forms a thick cushion, half-moon or shapeless lump, 10 to 30 cm across, occasionally 40 cm, and 5 to 15 cm thick. It often grows in several tiers.

Young brackets are cream, buff or yellowish and finely velvety, with a thick, rounded margin that weeps amber drops. Later they turn rusty brown, bald and lumpy, pitted where the drops have dried, and finally almost black and cracked.

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 tube layer is up to 2 cm deep. The pores are tiny, round then angular, 4 to 6 per mm, cream-yellow to greyish, later ochre and brown, and slowly bruise brown. Drops can form on the pores too.

The spore print is pale, whitish to yellowish.

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.

There's no stem: the bracket sits directly on the trunk base, root flare or roots.

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.

The flesh is yellow-brown, rusty or reddish brown, zoned and up to 10 cm thick. It's soft, spongy, fibrous and wet when young, then corky.

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

Old fruit bodies have a strong, unpleasant smell. The taste is bitter.