Site Redesign

Yes, I've been quite active in the blogosphere recently, and have just redesigned this site. Prominently featured are: a new background featuring some nice LBMs I found here in a lawn, and a new masthead featuring an anomalous mushroom, Phylloporus rhodoxanthus, the gilled bolete. Boletes typically have tubes, but the trait of having a lamellate hymenium (a.k.a. gills) is polyphyletic, which means that not all things with the trait have it by common descent. A familiar animal example of this would be wings, a character shared by birds, bats, and insects; the three groups are only distantly related, with lots of unwinged taxa in between.

Gills are found in the traditional Agaricoid fungi (with some losses of gills), and in many (but not all) Russuloid fungi (which look like agarics to most folks). Gills are also found in some polypores, like Lenzites and Daedalea (the latter really being an in-betweener), as well as the split gill fungus, Schizophyllum commune (below). Interestingly, none of the Ascomycota have gills.

Back to P. rhodoxanthus, you can see in the picture that the gills are a bit different, in that they have little stubs, like they want to fork or form tubes, but then they don't. Paxillus spp., also in the order Boletales, tend to have forked gills too.

Anyway, I hope you, dear reader, appreciate the new look. Hopefully I'll keep posting new stuff with some frequency. We've been getting a lot of rain here, so perhaps if it warms up a bit I'll be posting some of my discoveries along the way.