The fingers of dead men

This morning I came across these dead man's fingers protruding from the earth.
Fear not , they aren't the fingers of a real dead man but rather the fruiting bodies of a fungus known as Xylaria polymorpha. Dead man's fingers, is a saprobic fungus, that is to say that it gets its nutrition from dead and decaying organic matter. It is a common inhabitant of forest and woodland and usually grows from the bases of rotting or injured tree stumps and, as here, from decaying wood.