Welcome to Mushroom World

Welcome to Mushroom World, your resource for mushroom information. This site contains information and images of mushrooms found mainly in Europe and North America.

Many mushrooms are poisonous and some are lethally poisonous. It can be very hard to distinguish between an edible and a poisonous mushroom. We recommend, because of this, that you don't eat wild mushrooms at all, and this site does not contain any information about the edibility or toxicity of the mushrooms listed here.

There are thousands of different mushroom species, so we have tried to limit those we list to the most common ones. New species are also continuously added to the site.

Browse the database

You can browse the database from the alphabetical list or search the database based on mushroom name or some property.

Help identifying a mushroom

If you know the characteristics of a mushroom, but need help to identify it, try our Mushroom identification helper. You can browse mushroom pictures there and perhaps find a match.

If this site cannot help you, we recommend mushroomobserver.org, which is a community site for mushroom identifications. There are also many Facebook groups for mushroom identifications like the Mushroom Identification - public group.

Identification Quiz

We have also created a quiz where you can test how good you are at identifying fungi. You can repeat the quiz as many times as you want, each time with new questions.

Today's Mushroom

Today's mushroom is Bovista nigrescens (Brown puffball). It grows in North and West Europe. This site contains no information about the edibility or toxicity of the mushroom.

Description: This small, white, puffball, often referred to as the paltry puffball is attached to the substrate by a single mycelial cord. It grows solitary or in scattered troops in grass and pastureland mostly in late summer to autumn.

Fruiting body roughly spherical and slightly pointed at the bottom. The outer wall is white at first, but soon flakes off in large scales at maturity to expose the dark purple-brown to blackish inner wall that encloses the spore mass. Spore mass is at first white and firm, becoming clay-brown and finally olive-brown and powdery. Spores are brown.

Bovista nigrescens on Wikipedia.

Dimensions: 3-6 cm diameter * 3-6 cm tall

If you are interested in this mushroom, look it up in our database. You can find more detailed pictures there.