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& Checklist/Picturebooks ] "Pink-Gilled Limbed Amanita" non Amanita rhodophylla Imaz. & S. Toki nom. illeg. :: Technical description (t.b.d.) BRIEF DESCRIPTION: The following description is based on Beeli (1935). The cap of Amanita rhodophylla is 80 mm wide, yellowish-white, becoming satiny in drying, broadly campanulate-convex, smooth, with a lightly striate margin. The volva is absent. The flesh is white and firm. Gills are free, pink, rounded at the stem end, and 5 mm broad. Its stem is 120 × 7 - 11 mm, solid, white, markedly narrowing upward, fibrillose, and smooth, with a bulbous base. The stem is easily detachable from the cap. The ring is thin, membranous, white, skirt-like, becoming satiny on drying. The species is odorless. The taste is acrid. The spores measure 4 - 6 µm in diameter and are globose and inamyloid. Gilbert (1940) shows only a single spore in the proper position to be measured 8.3 × 7.4 µm and are subglobose. The present species was originally described from the Republic of Congo and was rather abundant in forests. Since the stipe is not totally elongated, this species belongs in Amanita sect. Amanita. The watercolor of Madame Goossens clearly shows a large bulb on the base of the stipe and the volva is limbate rather than saccate. Indeed the specimen suggests A. virosa Lam. as Gilbert (1941) observes. The only other species know to have both bulbs, membranous limbs, and inamyloid spores is A. lanivolva Bas associated with trees from the Caesalpinaceae in South American tropical forests. Several species that may have a bulb (for example A. pseudospreta Raithelh.) as well as a membranous volva and inamyloid spores are known from the southern cone of South America associated with Southern Beech (Nothofagus). It is interesting to speculate that these taxa probably of Gondwanan origin may be relictual descendents of ancestors of both section Amanita and section Vaginatae (at least subsect. Caesarea) as we know them today. -- R. E. Tulloss
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