Terrestrial Brown Spored     Family

This is a key to gilled mushrooms, that is, mushrooms having a definite cap with a fertile surface consisting of gills. The fruiting body usually also has a stem, although that may be lateral or absent (usually, then, the mushroom is growing from wood). You can use this key to identify mushrooms that you find.

Fruiting body containing fibers (usually in the stalk)

Gills not free
Spore print tan, orange, deep ochre, yellowish olive, olive brown, rusty or cinnamon brown or deep brown
Ring usually either absent or not membranous

Diagnosis

• Growing on the ground

Comments

Narrow down your identification:

• Growing near alder

• Cap usually less than 1" across, some dull shade of grey, brown or tan (whitish in one species); cone-shaped
  
• Stalk fragile, brittle; often quite long in proportion to its width (not so in the picture)
  
• Often growing in lawns
  
• Gills usually rusty brown to cinnamon brown at maturity
  
• Spore print ochre brown to cinnamon brown

• With a cobwebby partial veil called a cortina
  
• Stem often much wider at the base
  
• Spore print usually rusty brown or cinnamon brown

• Cap up to 4" across, but usually more like 1"; glabrous; some extremely nondescript shade of greyish brown
  
• Stem fleshy
  
• Gill edges often appear white, minutely fringed
  
• Always mycorrhizal; almost always in forests

• Cap with prominent radial fibers, often splitting radially
  
• All parts of the mushroom often scaly, scurfy, or tufted with minute hairs (barely visible on the stem in this image)
  
• Cap usually less than 2" across

• Cap up to 6" across; warm brown or orange brown to yellowish
  
• Membranous annulus present

Lookalikes: Paxillus involutus Cap up to 6" across; light brown; viscid, at least at the disk, when moist; often slightly velvety Fruiting body staining reddish brown when cut or bruised Usually with birch, oak or pine

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