Summary: Features include 1) a convoluted fruitbody with a brownish olive to blackish brown surface, the peridium lacking or disappearing early, 2) a slate-colored spore mass with irregular cavities mostly radiating from the branching, percurrent columella, 3) a stem 0.2cm thick, and 4) microscopic characters including spores measuring 11-16 x 6.5-8 microns that develop 7-10 wavy striae, and 1-4-spored basidia. It is rarely collected (Trappe).
Interior: "plumbeous-black", "slate color" in preservative, drying "fuscous-black", gelified; "cavities irregular, mostly radiating from the columella, empty"
Microscopic: spores 11-16 x 6.5-8 microns, young spores oval to elliptic, smooth, becoming striate with 7-10 wavy striae, spores "English red" to "burnt sienna", short-pedicellate; basidia 1-4-spored, 20-26 x 9-10 microns, clavate, colorless, sterigmata less than half the length of the spores; cystidia 52-61 x 25-35 microns, obovoid, colorless, guttulate, often somewhat apiculate; paraphyses 4-5 microns wide, narrowly clavate, colorless, guttulate, septate, some knobbed at tip, some filiform; subhymenial layer "pseudoparenchymatous, of large angular cells"; septa about 300 microns thick, composed of highly gelified, colorless hyphae
Notes: Collections were examined from BC and ID (Dodge). Pacific Northwest distribution is BC to ID and northern CA (Trappe(13)).
Habitat and Range
SIMILAR SPECIES
About 15 other Gautieria species in the Pacific Northwest are due to be described by States and Fogel (Trappe(13)).
Habitat
under conifers
Synonyms
Synonyms and Alternate Names: Guepiniopsis chrysocoma (Bull. ex Fr.) Brasf.