Weird, stinky and occasionally deadly: not everyone can make heart room for mushrooms. But Richard Fortey, a palaeontologist who recently retired from his post at the Natural History Museum after more than three decades’ service, has always found ‘pleasure and perplexity’ in the ‘alien’ world of fungi.

In his lovably nerdish 2021 memoir A Curious Boy, Fortey credited the Observer’s Guide to Common Fungi with setting him on the path to a passionate life scientific.