page_title: Galerina marginata
section_title: Taxonomy and naming
hierarchical_section_title: Galerina marginata / Taxonomy and naming
caption_attribution_description: English: Microscopic features of the gill edge of the fungus Galerina marginata, shown at 400X. Species originally recorded as the synonym G. autumnalis. Image cropped out and rotated from original by uploader. The larger structure is a cheilocystidium; the smaller structures are basidia bearing spores.
context_page_description: Galerina marginata, known colloquially as the funeral bell or the deadly skullcap, is a species of poisonous fungus in the family Hymenogastraceae of the order Agaricales. Prior to 2001, the species G. autumnalis, G. oregonensis, G. unicolor, and G. venenata were thought to be separate due to differences in habitat and the viscidity of their caps, but phylogenetic analysis showed that they are all the same species.
  The fruit bodies of this fungus have brown to yellow-brown caps that fade in color when drying. The gills are brownish and give a rusty spore print. A well-defined membranous ring is typically seen on the stems of young specimens but often disappears with age. In older fruit bodies, the caps are flatter and the gills and stems browner. The species is a classic "little brown mushroom"—a catchall category that includes all small to medium-sized, hard-to-identify brownish mushrooms, and may be easily confused with several edible species.
  Galerina marginata is widespread in the Northern Hemisphere, including Europe, North America, and Asia, and has also been found in Australia. It is a wood-rotting fungus that grows predominantly on decaying conifer wood.
context_section_description: What is now recognized as a single morphologically variable taxon named Galerina marginata was once split into five distinct species. Norwegian mycologist Gro Gulden and colleagues concluded that all five represented the same species after comparing the DNA sequences of the internal transcribed spacer region of ribosomal DNA for various North American and European specimens in Galerina section Naucoriopsis. The results showed no genetic differences between G. marginata and G. autumnalis, G. oregonensis, G. unicolor, and G. venenata, thus reducing all these names to synonymy. The oldest of these names are Agaricus marginatus, described by August Batsch in 1789, and Agaricus unicolor, described by Martin Vahl in 1792. Agaricus autumnalis was described by Charles Horton Peck in 1873, and later moved to Galerina by A. H. Smith and Rolf Singer in their 1962 worldwide monograph on that genus. In the same publication they also introduced the G. autumnalis varieties robusta and angusticystis. Another of the synonymous species, G. oregonensis, was first described in that monograph. Galerina venenata was first identified as a species by Smith in 1953. Since Agaricus marginatus is the oldest validly published name, it has priority according to the rules of botanical nomenclature.
  Another species analysed in Gulden's 2001 study, Galerina pseudomycenopsis, also could not be distinguished from G. marginata based on ribosomal DNA sequences and restriction fragment length polymorphism analyses. Because of differences in ecology, fruit body color and spore size combined with inadequate sampling, the authors preferred to maintain G. pseudomycenopsis as a distinct species. A 2005 study again failed to separate the two species using molecular methods, but reported that the incompatibility demonstrated in mating experiments suggests that the species are distinct.
  In the fourth edition (1986) of Singer's comprehensive classification of the Agaricales, G. marginata is the type species of Galerina section Naucoriopsis, a subdivision first defined by French mycologist Robert Kühner in 1935. It includes small brown-spored mushrooms characterized by cap edges initially curved inwards, fruit bodies resembling Pholiota or Naucoria and thin-walled, obtuse or acute-ended pleurocystidia that are not rounded at the top. Within this section, G. autumnalis and G. oregonensis are in stirps Autumnalis, while G. unicolor, G. marginata, and G. venenata are in stirps Marginata. Autumnalis species are characterized by having a viscid to lubricous cap surface while Marginata species lack a gelatinous cap—the surface is moist, "fatty-shining", or matte when wet. However, as Gulden explains, this characteristic is highly variable: "Viscidity is a notoriously difficult character to assess because it varies with the age of the fruitbody and the weather conditions during its development. Varying degrees of viscidity tend to be described differently and applied inconsistently by different persons applying terms such as lubricous, fatty, fatty-shiny, sticky, viscid, glutinous, or (somewhat) slimy."
  The specific epithet marginata is derived from the Latin word for "margin" or "edge", while autumnalis means "of the autumn". Common names of the species include the "marginate Pholiota" (resulting from its synonymy with Pholiota marginata), "funeral bell", "deadly skullcap", and "deadly Galerina". G. autumnalis was known as the "fall Galerina" or the "autumnal Galerina", while G. venenata was the "deadly lawn Galerina".
caption: Acute-ended cystidia are characteristic of Galerina species in the section Naucoriopsis.
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