Hi Stephen,

... well - I think if you had done the microscopy already at least a part of your questions would have been solved already.

Your fungus is a basidiomycete - and Clavaria and Clavulinopsis are basidiomycete genera. Exactly: they are Agaricales with reduced cap.

I think your specimen could be Clavaria incarnata or something similar, but surely a Clavulinopsis spec. is also possible. You will know more perhaps after microscopy. Besides the spore characters it would be important to see if there are clamps at the base of the basidia, and how those clamps look like.

Best regards from Lothar ("basidiofrance") :-)

Oooops!  You are perfeclty right sorry for the big flop, but this fungus completely tricked me out ! If it is an unappropriate post on ths ascoforum the admins  can safely delete it. Compensation a little image from a film I saw yesterdey !

PS a basidiofrance forum highly recommended :-p :-) :-*

No problem, Stephen - I think such small mistakes can happen to (almost) everybody :-)

Best regards, Lothar

Thanks Lothar, I think you hit the nail on the head. I have not detected clamp junctions, definitely not at the sterile hyphae, while it was more difficult to assess CJs  the base of the basidiomes, but spent lot of time under the microscope and I convinced myself that there aren't any either. Therefore the genus is Clavaria.

Amongst the unbranched Clavarias, according to a key I followed, I got also into Clavaria incarnata, but I dont know if there are Mediterranean vicariants to it.  The colours (including the greyish band at the stipe), the shape and size of the basidioma and the spores matched... the habitat was moss-covered clayey soil so I think half thumb up too. Not much else to examine (Cystidia absent...).

Apologies for posting carelessly this fungus here , but at least I owed my conclusion.
 

Hi Stephen,

I do not know about such mediterranean vicariants. So I would call the collectionClavaria incarnata for the first at least :-)

Best regards from Lothar

Sorry for keeping this off-topic thread going but I just wanted to point to this paper regarding a newly described mediterranean look-alike of C. incarnata: http://www.boscodeilucci.it/images/ClavariaMessapicaBoscoLucci.pdf

Lüderitz & Böhning also report this species from Schleswig-Holstein: http://www.pilze-schleswig-holstein.de/publikationen/Hotspot%20Fehmarn.pdf

... and back to ascomycetes. :-)

Best wishes,
Gernot

Also thanks from my behalf for keeping this up, as it turned to be very usefeul.

Many thanks also to Giernot for this paper. I am quite convinced that C. messampica is a better taxon for the Mediteranean region, but it seams that the closely related species with the C. incarnata complex can be concluded by DNA sequencing.

I have compared the microscopy and it looks very close. I've finally observed some cystidia and basidia and they match. I couldn't really see the tiny forked-structure at the base of the basidia, but I think that's now not determinant seeing that the other characters match. Spores 6.5-8.5um (-9.5um) and same lachrymoid shape. I could find only one difference according to the text of the paper pinned in previous post, where the authors claim the exsiccate becomes paler, while in my case, specimens became darker,  like pinkish medium brown when dried out. Another diffirence, if significant, and also different from C. incanata is that all specimens observed (6) were less than 3cm, while the other species are over 5cm, up to 8cm (incarnata) and 13cm (messapica).

I leave you with some images, they are not so good because the cells do not attain the stain so well and are very hyaline.