It’s getting to the time of year where people start asking about ‘toadstools’ and trying to eat mushrooms they found in cow pats, acting like Latin names are for ‘stuck up’ people rather than to stop you mixing up fungi and having the worst night(s) of your life on the loo

I know of one experienced forager who made a mistake with a tricky id and is still on dialysis.
Amanita Muscaria is not ‘deadly’, nor will touching any mushroom make you sick.
‘Russula’ covers 750 different mushrooms. Some are tasty, some literally have ‘Emetica’ in the name

‘All mushrooms are edible, some only once’ has been said 1 million times before and was not coined by Terry Pratchett, no matter what that meme says.
If you didn’t find it in the far Northern hemisphere on Birch then, no, it’s probably not Chaga.

Please don’t send your fungi-loving friends id photos like this and say you intend to eat it. It makes us very worried as whilst I can give a 90% certain guess that it’s a Red Cracking Bolete with Hypomyces Chrysospermus mould on it, I’m now worried that you’ve already tried it

Mushrooms are a whole other world and they deserve the time to read and research, so many wonderful mycorrhizal relationships, and parasitic ones. Mycelium that stretches for miles. 36,000 sexes to avoid mitochondrial mutations.
They look pretty magical too