Fungus ID help please

Factual Questions
1

First, don’t panic. I never eat wild fungi unless I am absolutely, rigorously certain of their identity and have eliminated possible lookalikes.

OK, there’s a big, rosette-like fungus growing near the base of a mature English oak tree near where I live (southern England). It’s about a foot across and maybe three inches tall and comprises a cushion-like mound of curly frills, quite firmly-rubbery to the touch, slightly greasy feeling.

I’ve observed it appearing several years in succession in this location and it starts out as a really dense, fist-sized body that is highly geometric/symmetric in appearance - like a romanesco cauliflower, but dark coppery red-brown.

As it matures and opens out, it turns lighter in colour, through purplish-brown to nut-brown. I have not had a chance to observe the smell, taste or spore print, nor to work out what the structure is beneath the outwardly visible top layer of frills

Here are some photos I took today:

Any ideas? I want to say Grifola, but I’ve never seen one in the flesh, and I can’t find an example online that is so finely-curled as this.

ETA: that’s a 12 inch ruler in one of the photos.

2

My initial semi-educated guess as well, but I’ve only run across one once myself and it was much paler. Still I found photos that are pretty tight and dark, like these two.

3

Cool, thanks. I’m going to collect it tomorrow if it’s still there - and I’ll do the full dichotomous key identification on it back at home.

4

Change of plan. Someone on another board has identified it as Podoscypha multizonata - which is quite rare and special - so I’ll be leaving it where it is (I’ve also contacted the British Mycological Society, in case one of their recording groups wants to take a look at it.

http://www.google.co.uk/images?q=Podoscypha+multizonata