Summary: Features include fruitbodies the grow flat, or shelf-like to shingled on conifers, tough caps that are whitish discoloring darker, small round to angular pores that are white to wood-colored discoloring darker, and microscopic characters including arboriform binding hyphae. The description is derived from Gilbertson(1).
Taste: slightly bitter
Microscopic: spores 7-10 x 2.5-3.5 microns, cylindric to oblong-elliptic, smooth, inamyloid, colorless, thin-walled; basidia 15-22 x 6-8 microns, clavate; cystidia absent; hyphal system dimitic: generative hyphae 1.5-4 microns wide, thin-walled and colorless, with clamp connections, "arboriform and usually dichotomously branched binding hyphae predominant in the fruitbody, hyaline, thick-walled to solid, up to 7 microns wide in the main stems, tapering down to thin whip-like ends"
Notes: Dichomitus squalens has been found in BC, WA, OR, ID, AB, MB, NB, NF, ON, PQ, SK, YT, AK, AZ, CA, CO, CT, LA, MD, ME, MI, MN, MS, MT, NE, NH, NJ, NM, NWT, NY, PA, SD, VA, VT, and WI, (Gilbertson).
Habitat and Range
SIMILAR SPECIES
Tyromyces and Trametes species can look similar macroscopically, but do not have the arboriform binding hyphae microscopically (Gilbertson).
Habitat
annual to reviving a second year, on conifers, causes "a white pocket rot in heartwood of living conifers and also of dead conifer wood"