Mushroom Identifier

Fungi encyclopedia

A reference for the fungi you actually find

Each entry describes one species the way you meet it in the field — the cap and its surface, what sits underneath, the stipe and its base, the spore print colour, the substrate it fruits from, and the species most often confused with it.

Showing results for Orange Moss Omphalina (likely)

Oyster Rollrim

Oyster Rollrim

Gilled

A stalkless ochre to yellow-brown fan on conifer wood, recognised by its inrolled wavy margin and soft, crowded, strongly forked and cross-veined orange-buff gills that separate easily from the flesh.

Spore print · Pale yellowish brown

Yellow Patches

Yellow Patches

Gilled

A small to medium eastern North American amanita with a glossy orange-yellow cap sprinkled with bright chrome-yellow flakes of universal veil. The same yellow material dusts the ring and the swollen stem base.

Spore print · White

Lurid Bolete

Lurid Bolete

Boletes

A red-pored bolete of limy soils recognised by the coarse red network covering its stipe and by the thin orange-red line revealed just above the tubes when the fruit body is cut lengthways.

Spore print · Olive-brown

Tawny Funnel

Tawny Funnel

Gilled

A rusty orange-brown funnel that fruits in dense crowded troops and rings in woodland litter, with very crowded decurrent gills that age to the cap colour.

Spore print · Pale cream

Slippery Jill

Slippery Jill

Boletes

A glutinous orange-yellow pine bolete with salmon-tinted pores and a thick, baggy, gelatinous ring that stains brown. Everything about it tends to be sticky.

Spore print · Cinnamon-brown

Bloody Milkcap

Bloody Milkcap

Gilled

A pine-associated milkcap of southern limestone woodland whose flesh releases dark blood-red latex the instant it is cut, with no orange phase at all.

Spore print · Pale cream to buff

Cortinarius gentilis

Cortinarius gentilis

Gilled

A small, slender, tawny-orange webcap of mossy conifer forest, with thick widely spaced ochre gills and yellowish veil bands on a slim stem. Its dry silky cap carries a sharp umbo.

Spore print · Rusty brown

Springtime Amanita

Springtime Amanita

Gilled

A spring-fruiting California amanita with a salmon-orange to peach cap, a strongly grooved margin, buff-tinted gills, and a thick sac-like volva. The ring is usually absent.

Spore print · White

Fly Agaric

Fly Agaric

Gilled

The archetypal storybook mushroom: a scarlet or orange cap sprinkled with white warts, standing on a white stem with a skirt-like ring and a bulbous base ringed by concentric scaly girdles.

Spore print · White

Chaga

Chaga

Polypores

A black, deeply cracked sterile mass that erupts from living birch trunks like a lump of charcoal, revealing bright rusty-orange interior tissue when broken.

Spore print · Pale brown (from hidden fertile crust)

Stalked Lattice Stinkhorn

Stalked Lattice Stinkhorn

Stinkhorns

A tall stinkhorn with a slender whitish stalk carrying a globose, orange-red latticed head whose mesh spaces are filled with dark olive spore slime.

Spore print · Not applicable (olive-brown gleba)

Parrot Waxcap

Parrot Waxcap

Gilled

A small, wholly glutinous waxcap that emerges bottle-green and then fades through yellow, orange and pink, usually keeping a green flush at the top of the slimy stem.

Spore print · White

False Turkey Tail

False Turkey Tail

Crusts

A thin, fan-shaped bracket banded in tan, orange and brown that mimics the true Turkey Tail from above but has a completely smooth, poreless underside.

Spore print · White

Red-belted Conk

Red-belted Conk

Polypores

A tough perennial bracket recognised by a shiny resinous crust banded in red-orange with a cream to white growing edge, and a hard white context. It is among the most abundant decay fungi of conifer logs in northern forests.

Spore print · White

Jelly Rot

Jelly Rot

Crusts

A soft, gelatinous crust that turns its upper edge outward into small white hairy shelves, with a shocking orange-pink wrinkled and ridged spore surface beneath. It sprawls in overlapping sheets across fallen logs in late autumn.

Spore print · White

Elegant Stinkhorn

Elegant Stinkhorn

Stinkhorns

A slender, unbranched stinkhorn that rises from a white egg as a tapering orange-to-pink spike, its upper third coated in dark olive slime. Common in mulched beds and rich leaf litter across eastern North America.

Spore print · Not applicable (olive-brown gleba)

Shaggy Bracket

Shaggy Bracket

Polypores

A large, thick, coarsely shaggy bracket that starts bright rusty orange and ages through dark brown to black, growing high on the trunks of living broadleaved trees.

Spore print · Yellowish brown

Lobster Mushroom

Lobster Mushroom

Other Fungi

Not a mushroom in its own right but a parasitic ascomycete that encases Russula and Lactarius fruitbodies in a pimpled, brilliant orange-red crust, twisting them into dense, contorted shapes.

Spore print · Not applicable

Ruby Bolete

Ruby Bolete

Boletes

A small, brilliantly red-capped bolete of parks and grassy woodland edges, recognised by yellow pores that bruise blue and tiny carrot-orange dots in the stem base.

Spore print · Olive-brown

Crowded Parchment

Crowded Parchment

Crusts

Dense masses of small, thin, orange-tan fans that fuse along their edges to sheathe fallen hardwood twigs and branches. The underside is smooth and unbroken, with no pores or wrinkles.

Spore print · White

Blue Tooth

Blue Tooth

Toothed

A corky ground-dwelling toothed fungus recognised by the blue tint of its growing margin and the two-toned blue and orange zoning revealed when it is sliced lengthwise.

Spore print · Brown

Jack-o'-Lantern

Jack-o'-Lantern

Gilled

A vivid orange clustering mushroom of hardwood stumps with true, sharp-edged, deeply decurrent gills that can glow faintly green in darkness, and a pale spore print.

Spore print · Cream to pale yellowish white

Caesar's Mushroom

Caesar's Mushroom

Gilled

A striking Mediterranean Amanita with a smooth orange cap, a strongly grooved margin, deep golden-yellow free gills and stem, and a thick white membranous sac at the base.

Spore print · White to pale cream

Hygrophorus Milkcap

Hygrophorus Milkcap

Gilled

An orange-brown North American milkcap recognised instantly by its very widely spaced, waxy-looking white gills and copious white latex that does not change colour. Its dry, velvety, wrinkled cap adds to the resemblance to a waxcap.

Spore print · White