A phylogeny is a reconstruction of how organisms are related by descent, drawn as a branching tree. For fungi it is now built mainly from DNA. The largest such study of Psilocybe, published in 2024, used 2,983 genes from 71 fungarium specimens (Bradshaw et al., 2024).
Phylogenies reshape names. DNA trees showed the old genus Psilocybe was two lineages, which led to the bluing species keeping the name and the non-bluing ones moving to Deconica (Norvell, 2009). A 2026 study found that the old limits of the families around Psilocybe did not each form one natural group, and proposed a new family (Niskanen et al., 2026).
They also date events, with wide error. The 2024 study estimated psilocybin production arose in Psilocybe about 67 million years ago at the earliest and passed to other mushrooms four or five times (Bradshaw et al., 2024). A 2026 preprint, not yet peer reviewed, put the genus’s crown group at about 28 million years against roughly 57 in the 2024 study (Slot et al., 2026). Trees are hypotheses that change with new data.
Sources
- Bradshaw et al., 2024, PNAS
- Norvell, 2009, Mycotaxon 110
- Niskanen et al., 2026 (PMC)
- Slot et al., 2026, bioRxiv preprint
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