Strangely Shaped Fungi
When talking about fungi, what comes to most people’s minds are umbrella-shaped mushrooms, such as shiitake mushrooms. However, there are fungi that look nothing like mushrooms.
In the Fungi kingdom, in the phyla Basidiomycota and Ascomycota, are fungi that produce large fruiting bodies and are called macrofungi. These include the umbrella-like mushrooms, such as shiitake, enoki, and button mushrooms, as well as large polyphores, such as Ganoderma spp., which are familiar. However, there are many types of macrofungi with unexpected shapes. For this online exhibition, we selected some examples from this museum’s collection.
The specimens in this exhibition include the gelatinous silver ear fungus and black jelly roll, as well as the non-gilled fungi Physalacria corticola and crown coral and gasteroid fungi bamboo mushroom, stinky squid, lantern stinkhorn, and dung bird’s nest, all in the phylum Basidiomycota. From the phylum Ascomycota, there are Dicephalospora rufocornea, mauve elfcup, Trichaleurina tenuispora, and Chinese cup fungus in the class Pezizomycetes.
Since it is difficult to observe the morphology of dried specimens, photographs taken in the field have been included to provide comparisons of fungal specimens and living fungi.
(The text and images for this exhibiton were jointly compiled by Huang Yu-ling and Wei Jia-ling.)
