Aulaxina

Aulaxina is a genus of lichen-forming fungi in the family Gomphillaceae. Species of Aulaxina are found predominantly in humid tropical forests across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, where they grow on the surface of living leaves, a foliicolous lifestyle. The genus is recognised by its distinctive blackish fruiting bodies, which open in a star-like or slit-like pattern, and by the small dark hairs and club-shaped reproductive structures that dot the thallus surface. The exact number of species in the genus is uncertain, as different taxonomic databases currently disagree on which names are accepted, and the boundaries of several species remain to be clarified.

==Taxonomy== The genus was circumscribed in 1825 by the French lichenologist Antoine Laurent Apollinaire Fée, who treated Aulaxina opegraphina as the type species. In the protologue, he illustrated the lichen on a leaf fragment and described the thallus as thin and membranous, with many small thalli. He also drew a magnified detail to show the triangular apothecia, which he described as opening at the top and occurring only in very small numbers, borne on grooved , rounded (orbicular) thalli.