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Today I found several of these in my back garden in Sydney NSW, Australia (specifically the north shore). They seem like flowers, except I don't see any attached plant and they have a weird brown goo around the mouth. I've never seen anything like this. Any ideas?

Mystery organism

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    $\begingroup$ That's absolutely an Aseroe stinkhorn. The way stinkhorns disperse their spores is rather interesting - rather than producing powdery wind-dispersed spores like most fungi, stinkhorns make flies do the disposal by placing the spores in a foul-smelling gel called gleba(the brown slime visible on your specimen). Flies pick up the stench, and land in it and eat it, thereby spreading the fungus to any suitable patch of soil that the fly lands on. $\endgroup$
    – SuperGuy
    Sep 5, 2022 at 4:18

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After some Googling, it seems maybe this is a stinkhorn fungus, specifically Aseroe rubra.

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