I was outside in my yard and I saw these strange looking things poking out the mulch…
What is it?? Hmmm….
So I took a picture of it. Noah warned me the whole time I was down on the ground trying to take a picture… he kept saying it was a rattle snake and if I keep shooting it, it would bite me…. BOYS I tell ya!

So I did some research…. boy GOOGLE is a great tool!

They are called Stink horn Mushrooms and they are called STINK horn for a reason…phew!! If I never see (or smell) another one of these in my yard again, I would be all too happy.

This is what google says about Stink horns

Stinkhorns are amazing mushrooms, notorious for popping up suddenly and unexpectedly in urban settings. They are very diverse in appearance, but all of them share at least two features:

# Some part of the fruiting body, at some stage in development, is covered with a foul-smelling slime.

# The fruiting body arises from an “egg,” traces of which may disappear by maturity.

Beyond these shared features, however, just about anything goes, and stinkhorns range from looking rather like Morels to appearing like, um, a portion of canine anatomy, or odd marine creatures with tentacles, or crab claws, Wiffle balls, Chinese lanterns, and so on.

Stinkhorns occur “naturally” in North America, especially in subtropical and tropical regions–but some stinkhorn fruitings in temperate and north-temperate climates may be caused by human endeavors, resulting from the transportation of soil, sod, wood chips, trees, and so on. Thus MushroomExpert contributor Ron Meyers found Lysurus mokusin outside a library in Lawrence, Kansas, and contributor Tim Geho found Aseröe rubra in South Carolina.

The method the stinkhorns use to disperse spores is quite ingenious, though a little disgusting to human sensibilities. The foul-smelling slime is calculated to attract flies and other insects, who land on the slime and gobble it up. Little do the insects know that they have been duped into covering their little insect feet with stinkhorn spores, and have ingested spores into their digestive tracts! Later, these spores are dispersed by the unwitting insects, and the stinkhorn life-cycle continues elsewhere.

One stinkhorn, Phallus impudicus, is often mistaken for a yellow morel by summer morel hunters who are hunting with their hearts instead of their minds. However, the season alone (to say nothing of the presence of stinky slime and the underground “egg”) should serve to separate the stinkhorn; morels don’t grow in summer . . . and “de Nile” is not just a river in Egypt.