E-Flora BC: Electronic Atlas of the Flora of British Columbia

Summary:
Features include small size, single or rosette form, funnel-shaped caps, thin bright orange brown flesh that is not zoned, and orange brown stem with a felty base. The description derived from Coker is for the type collection. Hall(3) does not mention this species for Washington but does include H. auratile which Harrison(4) does not include among North American Hydnellum species known to them: it is possible that the two names are referring to the same taxon in the Pacific Northwest. The two taxa are close enough that Franklin(1) reassigns a collection identified as H. conigenum from California to H. aurantile [sic] on the basis that the nearly 5cm preserved cap is too large for H. conigenum. According to Harrison(3), it is common in the Pacific Northwest.

Hydnellum conigenum is found from NM to BC and the Great Lakes region, (McKnight). It is reported also from FL, (McKnight) and ID (Coker). Collections were seen from NM to BC, including the type locality ID, and there is a collection from MI, (Harrison(3)).

Cap:
frequently fused, forming medium to large rosettes, caps 7cm across, funnel-shaped, margin wavy and lobed, may be split; "bright orange at first, soon zoned with light yellowish brown to moderate yellow and moderate orange to moderate reddish brown" (becoming darker and more brownish when old); velvety fibrillose or streaked, radially ridged, (McKnight), 3-7cm across, depressed to deeply funnel-shaped, complicate [bent on itself], lobed, fan-shaped, concrescent forming rosettes 8-10cm across, margin wavy and lobed; faintly to strongly zoned more or less "pinkish cinnamon" to "cinnamon-buff", "apricot-buff" to "mahogany red", darker when old, "long-persistent orange shade of the margin is diagnostic"; "surface irregular, radially ridged, fibrillose, tomentose, striate, or ridged", (Harrison(3)), 1-2cm, obconic, nearly flat, leathery, sometimes split on margin; grayish orange or yellowish orange; even, minutely downy, (Coker), rarely exceeds 6cm (Harrison(4))

Flesh:
thin, tough, not zoned, (McKnight), thin, tough, pliant; "pinkish cinnamon", (Harrison(3)), fibrous, not zoned; orange brown, (Coker)

Teeth:
short, close, fine, decurrent; colored like cap or brighter orange, (McKnight), up to 0.3cm long, "deeply decurrent, close, fine"; colored as cap or a brighter orange, (Harrison(3)), short, decurrent; whitish becoming brown, (Coker), lighter on tips (Harrison(4))

Stem:
3-6cm x 0.5-2cm, single or fused, bulbous; orange-brown with a felty base, (McKnight), 3-6cm x 0.5-2cm, simple or compound, bulbous at base; more or less orange-brown; "with a mass of felted tomentum at the base", (Harrison(3)), slender, central or sometimes off-center, thickened at base by dense spongy mass of orange-colored tomentum; colored like cap, (Coker)

Chemical Reactions:
when fresh, KOH turns flesh drab, after drying flesh turns dull olivaceous with KOH, (Harrison)

Odor:
faint to lacking, (McKnight), none to farinaceous (Harrison(3))

Taste:
strongly farinaceous, (McKnight, Harrison(3))

Microscopic:
spores 4.0-5.5 x 3.5-4.0 microns, nearly round to broadly elliptic, and angular, (McKnight), spores 4-5.5 x 3.5-4.5 microns, nearly round to oblong, angular, "with young spores showing a prominent mucro"; dark as though slightly amyloid; hyphae heavily incrusted, +/- 3 microns wide in teeth and up to 6 microns wide in cap, frequently swollen at septa, no clamp connections seen, numerous hyphae seen in hymenial layer with heavy concentrations of reddish granules, granules do not darken in Melzer''s reagent, (Harrison(3)), 4-5 microns in diameter, round, according to Peck, but 4-5 x 3.8-4.2 microns, nearly round, rather bluntly angled and warted according to Coker; basidia 4-spored, about 5.5 microns thick; hyphae of hard cap context about 3.8-6 microns thick, densely packed, parallel, rarely branched and with few cross walls, moderately thick-walled ("sometimes very irregularly and heavily thickened and with a good many encrusting granules"), a few clamp connections seen, (Coker)

Spore Deposit:
[presumably brown]