Squamella is a fungal genus in the family Cladoniaceae. The genus is monotypic, containing the single species Squamella spumosa, a squamulose lichen found in Australia. The genus was established in 2001 for a lichen collected in the McIlwraith Range of far-northern Queensland, distinguished by its flattened, leaf-like scales that develop foam-like masses of tiny at their tips. It lacks the stalked structures typical of related genera and grows on bark in seasonal monsoon forests. Its precise evolutionary relationships remain uncertain due to the absence of DNA sequence data.
GENUS
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Squamella is a fungal genus in the family Cladoniaceae. The genus is monotypic, containing the single species Squamella spumosa, a squamulose lichen found in Australia. The genus was established in 2001 for a lichen collected in the McIlwraith Range of far-northern Queensland, distinguished by its flattened, leaf-like scales that develop foam-like masses of tiny at their tips. It lacks the stalked structures typical of related genera and grows on bark in seasonal monsoon forests. Its precise evolutionary relationships remain uncertain due to the absence of DNA sequence data.
==Taxonomy==
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).