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The Shroomverse alien looking over dry valleys and a whitewashed church in southern Mexico at sunset.

SPECIES ATLAS · PSILOCYBE

Psilocybe zapotecorum

Named by R. Heim, 1957

Psilocybin record: confirmed (several modern analyses)

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.

Roger Heim published Psilocybe zapotecorum in the Revue de Mycologie 22(1): 77 in 1957, from Mexico. Guzmán emended the species concept in 1978 (Nova Hedwigia 29: 633), and his 1983 monograph cites it as 'Heim, emend. Guzmán'. The epithet refers to the Zapotec people; Miller et al. (2024) place the first collection in the Zapotec region of Oaxaca.

Named
R. Heim, 1957
Type specimen
Mexico (Species Fungorum); Miller et al. 2024 write that the first collection came from the Zapotec region of Oaxaca (Miller et al. 2024, J. Psychedelic Stud. 8: 63-81; pin = Wikidata coordinates for Oaxaca (Q34110))
Name record
Species Fungorum
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. 1958

    Reported Psilocybin reported by Heim & Hofmann (1958), as cited in Guzmán 1983 (species account and Table 11)

    Method: not stated in the source we read. Guzmán 1983, The Genus Psilocybe (Beih. Nova Hedwigia 74), archive.org scan

  2. 2022

    Confirmed Psilocybin, psilocin, baeocystin, norbaeocystin and aeruginascin detected in one ITS-documented collection; the authors call these the first analytical data for tryptamines in the species

    Method: UHPLC-MS/MS. Gotvaldová et al. 2022, Int. J. Mol. Sci. 23: 14068

  3. 2024

    Confirmed Psilocybin and related tryptamines measured in cultivated fruit bodies of a strain identified by DNA barcoding

    Method: HPLC (PDA detector). Miller et al. 2024, J. Psychedelic Stud. 8: 63-81

  4. 2026

    Confirmed Psilocybin and psilocin quantified in indoor-cultivated material whose identity was checked by DNA testing

    Method: HPTLC. Windsor et al. 2026, J. AOAC Int. 109: 37-50

What the record doesn’t show: The modern analyses are of one wild collection and of cultivated strains, so they say little about variation across the species' range.

Records on file.

GBIF, the global biodiversity database, held 852 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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