At 77 years, he certainly knew what he's picking up, it's not that hard to learn edible mushrooms, poisonous mushrooms and ignore the rest which may be edible but also not.
Plenty of edible mushrooms are just "twins" of poisonous mushrooms, using animal's knowledge to not eat them, without expending the metabolic cost to actually produce poison.
These are also living, evolving organisms. There will be mutants who knock back on a poisonous gene.
The Russia rocket expert was likely killed.
https://www.thegreatmorel.com/regional-morels-midwest-region....
Do you have a citation or evidence for this? I ask because a while ago another commenter on HN said that the president of a mushroom society in Boston died from the same thing, and when I looked and searched I could find no mentions of this.
Without additional evidence I'm putting all claims of "Mushroom expert does from mushroom misidentification!" into the "old wives tale/bullshit bucket". These types of stories just seem to be the ones that people love to talk about and share, even if they originate as a falsehood. Again, not saying it's not possible, but I am saying without a reasonable citation I'm discounting it as BS.
If I've understood the previous commenter correctly, he's talking about a виц (comes from German witz, cognate of wit in English) which is a funny story joke that spreads by word of mouth. Here is the one in question:
https://kvo.bg/vicove/vicOTJK1I/vapros-koi-sa-poslednite-dum...
Roughly:
> Q: What were the last words of the mushroom forager?
> A: I hadn't tried that kind until now!
I do not think anyone thinks it's real; you might be getting caught up by the word "story", just some dark Balkan humor.
Also, the whole point of their comment was to emphasize how foraging for mushrooms is dangerous - using an old wives tale as "evidence" for your position would be a very odd choice indeed.
Objection, conjecture!
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