A Czech amateur mycologist, Slavomír Valda, has unearthed a truffle-like mushroom,Sedecula pulvinata, in South Moravia, previously believed to exist only in the western United States. Miroslav Kolařík from the Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Microbiology shed light on the rarity: “In the United States it grows in dry, deciduous mountain forests, in an elevation of 2,000 metres and up. If you know the beautiful forests of Sierra Nevada, that’s the mushroom’s original habitat. But Pálava is very different. It’s a lowland, covered by broad-leaved oak forests.”