Polychidium is a genus of lichen-forming fungi in the family Massalongiaceae. These lichens form tiny, shrub-like tufts with branching filaments that create woolly cushions on moss-covered rocks and tree twigs. The genus was traditionally thought to include four similar-looking species, but molecular studies revealed that three of these actually belong to a different genus called Leptogidium. Today, Polychidium in the strict sense contains only P. muscicola and three closely related species, found from tropical to subarctic regions worldwide.
GENUS
via GBIF
Polychidium is a genus of lichen-forming fungi in the family Massalongiaceae. These lichens form tiny, shrub-like tufts with branching filaments that create woolly cushions on moss-covered rocks and tree twigs. The genus was traditionally thought to include four similar-looking species, but molecular studies revealed that three of these actually belong to a different genus called Leptogidium. Today, Polychidium in the strict sense contains only P. muscicola and three closely related species, found from tropical to subarctic regions worldwide.
==Taxonomy==
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).