Boom!

While walking around the star trees multiple times, trying to get better views, I came across a very odd looking branch by the art building. The branch was weird because it had 7 things on it that at first looked like mushrooms with the broad end attached to the branch and the stalk pointing out. Each of the "mushrooms" was about 2" in diameter on the broad end and the stalks were about 1/4" thick and 3" long. The branch was only a couple feet long, so it seemed like a lot of growths for one little fallen branch. After further inspection, picking it up and analyzing it, I realized that these were actually pine cones that never developed fully. The bottom quarter of them all looked normal, but they just had cores for the rest of their structure. I thought it was kind of cool that I had a snapshot of the development of the pine cones.
Also, when I looked up and saw the tree that the branch came from I recognized this particular tree. When I was little I called it an exploding pine cone tree. I called it that because when you take one of the pine cones and throw it at the ground in explodes into a bunch of pieces and is really cool. When I was little a guy had them in his yard and they were hard to get because he had a fence, so when one would roll out it was special and really exciting, so when I discovered we had one on campus I got pretty excited about it.