Having dodged the worst parts of an ice storm, a few days of warmer weather are predicted where the daytime temps will be above freezing. Along with this comes rain, but with the ground still frozen, a lot of runoff is expected. Here and there a few sprouts of early bulbs are peeking out. However if you want to see some happily green organisms, start looking at tree bark and branches. Without the crown of leaves, more sunlight will fall on tree trunks than you might expect, and lichens take advantage of this. These are really tough organisms. Tree bark, stones, cement, these are really hard substrates; organisms growing there are highly exposed, subject to desiccation and temperature extremes, and yet in places the lichens are almost luxuriant. Locally common lichens grow as a crust and so don't look as lush as the larger, more branched or leafier types (fruticose or foliose). Although TPP is not adept at identifying lichens, he loves the Lichens of North America; a wonderfully illustrated atlas of lichens (just the ID keys and other field guides are also available). Should you decide to give it a go, you'll run into a bit of a terminological learning curve and the need of come magnification. Maybe a kind reader will offer some suggestions about the lichens shown here.
If you don't already know this, lichens are symbiotic organisms, basically a fungal body housing symbiotic algae. The algae can still be free-living, and so to the fungus, but neither one alone looks like the lichen.
It's been a wet, cool fall, a great season for fungi, and this is just the right time of year to spot oyster mushrooms, Pleurotus ostreatus. And you urban dwellers don't need to miss out, a walk around almost any well-treed neighborhood should result in success. Oyster mushrooms grow on wood and they are pretty easy to identify, especially given the season, and they are very tasty, very choice, highly recommended by many. The caps are asymmetrical and around here sort of a pale silvery gray color on top, white gills beneath, firmly fleshy. There were enough growing on the side of just this one maple tree to feed a lot of people.
No regular fungus feature is planned, but this was just too fine to not share. Found this very attractive fungus while exploring a prairie glade high on a river bluff. The common name is jack-0-lantern because it is a big pumpkin orange mushroom (Omphalotus illudens) and because at night the gills glow with a green luminescence; really spooky the first time you see it. Be careful mushroomers because people mistake this quite poisonous mushroom for Cantharellus cibarius, the golden chantarelle, which is choice eating. This is a good test for your recognition abilities.
Prototaxites has been a classic enigmatic fossil, which means no one knew what it was other than it appeared to be really big when nothing else really was. Prototaxites appeared to be some type of cylindrical axis , which when stood upright would have looked like telephone poles on a landscape of plants standing little taller than your living room carpet. That’s because Prototaxites existed during the Late Silurian and Devonian, a period of time when vascular plants were just getting their rhizomes under themselves. Prototaxites fossils display a strange spiral inner organization and a filamentous composition.
Not too long ago, the filamentous organization of Prototaxites led to its identification as a fungus, the “humongous fungus” and this is the actual cover of the journal this research was published in. 
remains bear similarities to enigmatic fossils of early land plants. The evidence they present suggests Prototaxites formed a helical cylinder when a large mat of liverworts was rolled up probably by the winds that would have howled across a treeless landscape. This further reinforces the hypothesis that plants with a bryophyte level of organization (mosses and liverworts) were pioneers on land long before vascular plants appeared. The Phactor hopes that PATL (People Against the Torture of Liverworts) doesn’t begin picketing her lab. 
