Variospora is a genus of crustose lichens belonging to the family Teloschistaceae. The genus was established in 2013 when DNA studies revealed that many species previously grouped under the traditional large genus Caloplaca actually belonged to distinct evolutionary lineages. These bright orange lichens are distinguished by their variable ascospore shapes—which can be lemon-shaped, hourglass-shaped, or simply divided by a straight partition—and their distinctive purple reaction when tested with potassium hydroxide solution.
GENUS
via GBIF
Variospora is a genus of crustose lichens belonging to the family Teloschistaceae. The genus was established in 2013 when DNA studies revealed that many species previously grouped under the traditional large genus Caloplaca actually belonged to distinct evolutionary lineages. These bright orange lichens are distinguished by their variable ascospore shapes—which can be lemon-shaped, hourglass-shaped, or simply divided by a straight partition—and their distinctive purple reaction when tested with potassium hydroxide solution.
==Taxonomy==
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).