Summary:
Features include 1) collybioid stature, 2) a convex to umbilicate, dry cap that is gray or grayish brown, 3) subdecurrent, mouse gray gills that become near clay buff with whitish, finely frosted edges, 4) a pubescent stem that is milky coffee to grayish brown in color, 5) a pinkish to gray-brown spore deposit, and 6) microscopic characters including inflated septate cheilocystidia. |Spore features are intermediate between those found in Entoloma or Nolanea and Rhodocybe, but inflated septate cheilocystidia are distinctive. |The online Species Fungorum, accessed Oct 3, 2020, listed the current name as Clitopilopsis hirneola, but MycoBank, accessed the same day, listed the current name as Rhodocybe hirneola. |The description derived from Baroni(1) except where noted. |It is not common.
Collections were examined from BC, WA, OR, ID, MB, NB, QC, AK, MA, MI, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Italy, Norway, Sweden, and Switzerland, (Baroni(1)).
Cap:
0.7-2cm across, "convex and occasionally with a low broad umbo at first", becoming flat-convex "with disc often depressed to somewhat umbilicate", margin incurved and frequently crenate [scalloped] at first, becoming decurved [downcurved] and even; evenly smoke gray or often darker and near drab to between grayish isabelline and grayish hazel when young, becoming paler when old or upon drying, clay buff to vinaceous buff; dry, bald to finely matted fibrillose, often shiny, occasionally cracked when old, (Baroni), 1-3cm across, "gray to dirty gray-brown, frosted whitish on the crown", (Phillips)
Flesh:
thin (up to 0.1cm at disc), fleshy, whitish; in stem pale grayish
Gills:
subdecurrent, close or subdistant, occasionally forked near stem attachment; pale mouse gray at first, eventually near clay buff, edges whitish; edges pubescent under lens, (Baroni), curvingly decurrent; gray to brownish, (Phillips)
Stem:
1-3cm x 0.1-0.35cm at top, equal or narrowing slightly to base, straight, brittle, "solid, becoming loosely stuffed or hollow in the apex"; colored as cap or darker, milky coffee to hazel to "hair brown" [Ridgway(1) color]; densely whitish pubescent in upper part, somewhat pubescent or scattered appressed-fibrillose to base, white mycelioid over base
Odor:
not distinct or faintly to distinctly farinaceous when flesh cut or crushed
Microscopic spores:
spores 5.5-8(8.5) x 5-6.5(7) microns, nearly round to broadly oboval in face view, some round, mostly nearly round to short elliptic and adaxially flattened in side view, occasionally more or less angular in side view, often round but many obscurely to distinctly angular in end view, "smooth or some with slightly irregular surface in all views", walls cyanophilic, inamyloid, more or less thickened (about 0.5 microns), pale grayish in KOH; basidia 4-spored, 20-30 x 7-9(10) microns, lacking cyanophilic bodies; pleurocystidia not differentiated, cheilocystidia infrequent or abundant, 20-45(50) x 5.5-9(15) microns, clustered or scattered, projecting up to 30-40 microns from hymenium, thin-walled, 1-4 septate, colorless, "ultimate cell cylindric to greatly inflated, occasionally branched"; clamp connections absent
Spore deposit:
pinkish (Baroni), moderately grayish brown when fresh becoming rosy brown upon drying (Wells and Kempton in Baroni), gray-brown (Phillips)
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