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SPECIES ATLAS · GYMNOPILUS

Gymnopilus purpuratus

Named by (Cooke & Massee) Singer, 1955

Psilocybin record: reported (one or older reports)

A history of a name and a chemistry record, not an identification guide. No name, picture or description can show that a wild mushroom is safe, and poisonous mushrooms are mistaken for magic mushrooms. If someone may have eaten a wild mushroom, call a poison centre without waiting for symptoms: 1-844-POISON-X in most of Canada, 1-800-463-5060 in Quebec. Call 911 if they’re unconscious, not breathing or having a seizure.

How it was named.

Cooke and Massee published Agaricus purpuratus in Grevillea in 1890 (holotype K(M) 32888). Singer moved it to Gymnopilus in 1955 in Sydowia. Kreisel & Lindequist (1988) call it a species of the southern (austral) zone, known from southern Australia and Chile, that turned up in northern East Germany from 1983.

Named
(Cooke & Massee) Singer, 1955
First published as
Agaricus purpuratus Cooke & Massee (1890)
Other names in the records
Agaricus purpuratus Cooke & Massee, Flammula purpurata (Cooke & Massee) Sacc.
Type specimen
Holotype K(M) 32888 (Index Fungorum, which gives Great Britain). Kreisel & Lindequist (1988), citing Pegler 1966 and Singer 1969, say the type locality is the fern house of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, where it appeared in May 1887. (Kreisel & Lindequist 1988, Z. Mykol. 54: 73-76)
The pin marks the type locality at the level of detail the record gives: one historical collection, not a range or a place to look. Land outlines: Natural Earth.

The psilocybin record.

Every analysis we could verify, oldest first, including results that found nothing. No amounts are given: they vary between collections and this is not a potency guide.

  1. 1988

    Reported Psilocybin detected in fruiting bodies collected near Ribnitz-Damgarten (northern East Germany); psilocin and baeocystin not assessed

    Method: thin-layer chromatography, co-chromatographed with Psilocybe semilanceata extract. Kreisel & Lindequist 1988, Z. Mykol. 54: 73-76 (full text, Zobodat)

  2. 1989

    Confirmed Psilocybin, psilocin and baeocystin found in every fruiting body from two East German localities; muscarine and aeruginascin absent

    Method: HPLC and TLC in three systems. Gartz 1989, Persoonia 14: 19-22 (full text, archive.org, CC BY)

What the record doesn’t show: Both analyses use material from one adventive East German population in the 1980s; no modern analysis or analysis of austral material was found.

Records on file.

GBIF, the global biodiversity database, held 581 occurrence records under this name, 0 of them from Canada, when we checked on October 25, 2026. Records include unverified observations and old misidentifications, so counts show where people have recorded the name, not where it grows.

See the name on GBIF

Sources

Compiled from the sources above; last checked .

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