In the 1920s, Chinese student Shu Chun Teng earned a scholarship to study mycology at Cornell University, in upstate New York.
During World War II, Teng's unparalleled collection of mushroom samples was smuggled out of China to keep it from the invading Japanese.
Now, Cornell says it will share the Fungi of China Collection with the Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
Many of the mushrooms don't look like much, just dried up brown flakes.
But scientists say some of the samples are irreplaceable bits of natural history.
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