Wynnea
genus of fungi
Wynnea is a genus of fungi in the family Sarcoscyphaceae. Circumscribed by Miles Joseph Berkeley and Moses Ashley Curtis in 1867, the genus contains seven species that have ear-shaped fruit bodies that grow on the ground. Wynnea species have a worldwide distribution and have been collected from the United States, Costa Rica, India, and China.
Taxonomy
The genus Wynnea was circumscribed by English naturalist Miles Joseph Berkeley in 1867 to accommodate the species Wynnea gigantea and Peziza macrotis. The former specimen was collected by Botteri near Orizaba, Mexico, and the latter had been described by Berkeley in his Journal of Botany and Kew Garden Miscellany (1851) Both species were subsequently illustrated in Cooke's Micrographia. No other collections of Wynnea were reported for several decades, and in Pier Andrea Saccardo's Sylloge, the genus was reduced to synonymy with the genus Midotis. American mycologist Roland Thaxter described a new species in 1905, W. americana, which was collected in Tennessee.
Description
The fruit bodies (technically called apothecia) are thick, firm, tough and become almost leathery after drying. Standing erect, the ear-shaped apothecia are several- to many-clustered on a common stalk that arises from a sclerotium, a hardened mass of mycelium buried in the earth. The paraphyses (sterile cells interspersed amongst the asci) are cylindrical, simple or branched.
The public source identifies “Wynnea” as genus of fungi. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Wynnea, genus and fungi.
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Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Oct 24, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4111634. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1867, 1851 and 1905.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wynnea” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.