Australasian sequestrate fungi 18: Solioccasus polychromus gen. & sp. nov., a richly colored, tropical to subtropical, hypogeous fungus

To the best of our knowledge, one or more authors of this paper were federal employees when contributing to this work. This is the publisher’s final pdf. The published article is copyrighted by the Mycological Society of America and can be found at: http://www.mycologia.org/.Cover image—Solioccasus polychromus, an Australasian, tropical to subtropical, hypogeous member of the Boletineae. Upper image by Roy Halling, immature specimens, lower image by Michael\ud Castellano, mature specimens. See article by Trappe et al. in this issue.Solioccasus polychromus gen. & sp. nov., the most brightly colored hypogeous fungus known, is described from Papua New Guinea and tropical northern Australia south into subtropical forests along the Queensland coast and coastal mountains to near Brisbane. Phylogenetic analysis of molecular data places it as a sister genus to Bothia in the Boletineae, a clade of predominantly ectomycorrhizal boletes. Ectomycorrhizal trees, such as members of the Myrtaceae (Eucalyptus, Corymbia, Lophostemon, Melaleuca spp.) and Allocasuarina littoralis, were present usually in mixture or in some cases dominant, so we infer some or all of them to be among the ectomycorrhizal hosts of S. polychromus