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SPECIES ATLAS · PSILOCYBE

Psilocybe pelliculosa

Named by (A.H. Sm.) Singer & A.H. Sm., 1958

Psilocybin record: reported (older analyses only)

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.

Alexander H. Smith described Psathyra pelliculosa in 1937 in Mycologia 29: 58, from an Oregon collection. Singer and Smith moved it to Psilocybe in 1958 (Mycologia 50: 280), the name accepted today.

Named
(A.H. Sm.) Singer & A.H. Sm., 1958
First published as
Psathyra pelliculosa A.H. Sm. (1937)
Other names in the records
Psathyra pelliculosa A.H. Sm.
Type specimen
Oregon, USA (Index Fungorum: holotype MICH, Smith 3431). (Index Fungorum record, Psathyra pelliculosa; pin = Wikidata coordinates (Q824))
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. 1961

    Reported Psilocybin reported (Tyler 1961, Lloydia 24: 71-74)

    Method: paper chromatography (per Bradshaw Table S1). Guzmán 1983, The Genus Psilocybe (Beih. Nova Hedwigia 74), Table 11, archive.org scan

  2. 1977

    Reported Listed with baeocystin and psilocybin in Guzmán 1983 Table 11, citing Repke et al. 1977; the abstract does not name species

    Method: thin-layer chromatography. Repke, Leslie & Guzmán 1977, Lloydia 40: 566-578 (abstract, Europe PMC)

  3. 1982

    Reported Included in a 20-species survey that found psilocybin in seven species; Bradshaw Table S1 lists P. pelliculosa among them

    Method: HPLC and TLC. Beug & Bigwood 1982, J. Ethnopharmacol. 5: 271-285 (abstract)

What the record doesn’t show: All analyses date from 1961-1982, none had molecular identification of the specimens, and the papers' species-level results were read only through two reviews.

Records on file.

GBIF, the global biodiversity database, held 691 occurrence records under this name, 114 of them from Canada, when we checked on October 25, 2026. GBIF lists 114 occurrence records from Canada under this name (checked 2026-10-25); the records are not verified identifications. 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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