I wanted to take a moment to share something exciting that we found out recently. Some type sequences from a small collection of Entoloma have been sequenced - these are very old types, so many of them were fails and we’ll have to keep trying, but a few of them have come back matching some of the temp codes we have in the sequencing community.
One I want to highlight is this guy, Entoloma howellii - https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/1664869-Entoloma-howellii
This species was originally described in 1911 from a collection found in Rockville, Indiana. There are a few other scattered collections in Mycoportal, with the last one being reported from 1943. The name was them recombined into Entoloma (it was Nolanea previously) in 1953 and, as far as I can tell, promptly forgotten about - it does NOT appear in Hesler’s 1967 monograph ‘Entoloma in Southeastern North America.’
Turns out the sequence from it matched a modern collection - specifically, this one here https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/234819309. Comparing the original description notes to the modern, color photographs gives us a seriously good match for a mushroom - and by golly it is a BEAUTY of a mushroom. It properly belongs in subgenus Leptonia section Dichroa, but a little modern paper work is going to be done so we can update the iNat taxonomy.
With these modern pictures to help us put a gestalt to a description, we were able to pick through observations of Leptonia in the eastern US and actually managed to pull out some others and gives names to observations, and oh, what a stunning little collection of mushrooms it is https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?verifiable=true&taxon_id=1664869&preferred_place_id=81418. I’m used to seeing Entoloma from other regions of the world be this vibrantly blue, but ours tend to be a little more subdued - as this genus goes, this is a very distinctive mushroom and it is honestly astounding to me that it just flew under the radar for decades.
I cannot tell you how excited I am getting this one figured out, and it is just one example of how we have been utilizing sequencing/temp codes/etc to actually put real names on some of these fungi with uncertain identifications.