Metuloidea is a genus of five species of fungi in the family Steccherinaceae. The genus was circumscribed by New Zealand-based mycologist Gordon Herriot Cunningham in 1965. The type species is M. tawa, a fungus originally described by Cunningham as a species of Trametes. Formerly classified in family Meruliaceae, Metuloidea was moved to the Steccherinaceae in 2016, following prior research that outlined a revised framework for the Steccherinaceae based on molecular phylogenetics.
GENUS
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Metuloidea is a genus of five species of fungi in the family Steccherinaceae. The genus was circumscribed by New Zealand-based mycologist Gordon Herriot Cunningham in 1965. The type species is M. tawa, a fungus originally described by Cunningham as a species of Trametes. Formerly classified in family Meruliaceae, Metuloidea was moved to the Steccherinaceae in 2016, following prior research that outlined a revised framework for the Steccherinaceae based on molecular phylogenetics.
==Description== Metuloidea contains fungi that produce poroid or hydnoid fruit bodies that are brown and have a sweet odour. It features a dimitic hyphal system with branched, relatively wide skeletal hyphae (3–5 μm). The spores are ellipsoid to cylindrical, thin walled, and measure 3–4 by 2–2.8 μm.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).