What excites me as a chemist (and as someone who dabbled in psychedelics as a teenager) is the prospect of identification the active components... and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals.

The great, late Alexander Shulgin made his fame through systematic tweaking of the tryptamine and phenethylamine backbones, giving rise to many interesting psychoactive, mostly psychedelic compounds. Nature has a few more classes of psychedelics, but it's very rare to come across an entirely new category of molecular compounds.

Because the hallucinations are seemingly distinct from the effects from traditional psychedelic, that's... pretty tantalizing. But the mushroom does bruise blue, which is what tryptamine-containing magic mushrooms also do.

It's super exciting, all in all. It's either a cultural or mass psychological effect (but I doubt it personally), an as of yet unidentified tryptamine-like compound that's highly active (and thus difficult to isolate because theres relatively little mass of it) or an entirely novel chemical class.

I don’t think the article was insinuating that these mushrooms were a new discovery, they’ve been known not just in the region but to scientists for some time, though they did assert that this is the first time that the DNA had been sequenced.