Dryad's Saddle?
Here's a cool-looking mushroom I saw sprouting out of a fallen dead tree trunk. It was identified on iNaturalist as a Dryad's Saddle mushroom (AKA Pheasant's Back mushroom). If this is a Dryad's Saddle, it's considered edible when cooked, and pleasant enough to eat when young. (It sounds like it gets all fibrous when it gets old.) Years ago I bought a book called Mushrooms of Northeastern North America with the intention of learning to identify our local mushrooms. There were problems: Though I'm sure New Jersey has only a subset of these, the book covers 1500 species of mushrooms. That's a lot of potential candidates to work through. For many species, a proper ID often requires obtaining a spore print, obtained by putting the mushroom on a piece of white paper, covering it, and waiting 8 hours. Spore prints aren't really compatible with my light-traveling, quick-visiting nature walks. Finally, I'd hate to identify a mushroom as edible only to f...