Scoby/mother on rosehip vinegar?

[audaciouspiglet]

Hello:
A year ago I made rosehip (in) vinegar (not fermenting the rosehips, per se, but preserving them in apple cider vinegar as per an herbal medicine recipe). It developed a thing on top that is thick, and looks like a scoby that you would get on the top of kombucha (kind of).
It is brownish, looks like a type of fungus/mold/creature, but lifts up all as one piece like a scoby. It was kind of sealing the fruit under in the liquid. (It has kind of vertical extremely thin lines in it, that look like mushroom gills).

The cider was raw, unfiltered apple cider vinegar, though I did not purposely put any mother in with the rosehips.
I am guessing its probably all right to use this "rosehip vinegar"... as this is probably normal. Does anyone know if this is normal? Or what it is?
It does not look like the mother that is in my apple cider vinegar, ever.
I suppose the question isn't very important, though I did hesitate to try it due to not understanding exactly what it might be, for about a year. I finally just tried it and illogically now feel compelled to ask about it. I didn't instantly die, though I suppose its still a possibility. My guess is that the rosehips, particularly being very wild and natural, formed their own yeasty/bacterial creature, maybe helped or maybe not, by the apple cider vinegar (?)

This relates to another question involving making vinegar. Is adding an already made mother to newly picked fruit an equally valid way to make vinegar, as brewing the new fruit and making it turn to vinegar? Are both ways used commercially, or is the adding old mother a sort of quick and dirty method? If adding live culture to new fruit makes vinegar out of it (I don't understand how this could work as well), then is my rosehip vinegar really proper rosehip vinegar now, or just rosehips soaked in apple cider vinegar? I mean did the apple cider vinegar with live yeast make the rosehips ferment and turn to vinegar, themselves?

Thanks to anyone who can enlighten me at all.

[Christopher Weeks]

I'm no expert, but it sounds like a mother of vinegar involved with other organisms. The mother, like any SCOBY, isn't really the source of the colony, but a by-product, so there's essentially no difference in starting vinegar with our without a mother, as long as there's some live culture transferred.