Whipped Cream Difficulties

By way of the YCombinator news feed:

From around 420 to 350 million years ago, when land plants were still the relatively new kids on the evolutionary block and “the tallest trees stood just a few feet high,” giant spires of life poked from the Earth. “The ancient organism boasted trunks up to 24 feet (8 meters) high and as wide as three feet (one meter),” said National Geographic in 2007. With the help of a fossil dug up in Saudi Arabia scientists finally figured out what the giant creature was: a fungus. (We think.)

(You know, I’d read about Mantango in one of the Golden Turkey books, but it wasn’t until I read the Wikipedia entry that I became aware it was based on a William Hope Hodgson short story.)