“Red” Mushroom

I sketched this red mushroom a few miles up Camp Six Road, but it’s found in tropical areas world-wide so it may also be found at BIB. I’ve seen similar ones here at BIB. They look a lot like this but they are usually nearly perfectly round and shaped like a soup bowl, slightly translucent, often hairy, and quite a lot smaller. This one was a couple of inches across.

There are seventeen species in the Phillipsia genus, but although I posted this illustration to a mushroom ID site, the closest anyone could identify it to was the genus Phillipsia. So there ya are. 

This pretty little thing was growing from a rotten branch on the ground, and its flesh was fairly tough, the red surface velvety and smooth, the underside, as you can see, is a bit rough but without gills (that bit of info is for mushroom aficionados). I’m not very well-versed on mushrooms, lichens, and fungi in general, but I very much admire them and they are great sketching subjects as they don’t move around much.

A fungus, by the way, typically lives in soil or rotting wood, and is made up of thread-like strands called mycelia and a fruiting body of some sort. A mushroom is a fruiting body of the fungus, producing spores which are cast to the wind to produce more fungi elsewhere. Basically, the mushroom is to the rest of the fungus as a flower is to the rest of the plant.

There wasn’t much information to be found about Phillipsia Berk. except this from Wikipedia:  “Phillipsia is a genus of fungi in the family Sarcoscyphaceae. There are about 17 species in the genus, which collectively have a widespread distribution in subtropical and tropical areas.”