This mushroom hatches from an 'egg', looks like a starfish and reeks of old meat

What hatches from an egg, looks like a starfish, smells like dank meat and uses flies to do its bidding?

This fungus, apparently.

It sounds too weird to be true, but thanks to the time-lapse photography of Steve Axford from the Northern Rivers region of NSW – we can prove it.

Axford's time-lapse footage of the alien-like fungus is so incredible it was featured on the third episode of BBC's Planet Earth II.

It was shot in Axford's "fungarian" – a shipping container filled with fungi which acts as a kind of mushroom filming studio. 

"If conditions are right, they'll start to form these little nodules when then grow into what look like eggs," he told the ABC.

"Eventually at some stage they burst open into a starfish."

What now?

This weird organism is a fungus, but it's also like an egg and a starfish – what a combo.

Axford says it is a "specular fungus" which sounds like a British insult, but he means it in a positive way.

"It's what's called a 'stink horn'," he says (another insult to keep up your sleeve for your siblings).

"The name 'aseroe rubra' means 'disgusting red juice' in Latin."

And he's not kidding.

These guys have a bad rep for bringing the pong, with descriptions likening them to "putrid rotting meat" and "rank pair of old sneakers".

Apparently the stench attracts flies, which it uses to spread its spores.

The wonderful world of nature, huh?