Polyporus squamosus (Dryad’s Saddle)
Family
Polyporaceae
Location
Europe, North America and Asia
Dimensions
Cap 5-30 cm diameter, 0.5-5 cm thick
Edibility
This site contains no information about the edibility or toxicity of mushrooms.
Description
Polyporus squamosus, also known as Cerioporus squamosus or Dryad’s Saddle, is a polypore that has a distinctive fan or saddle-shaped fruiting body with scaly brownish caps. It grows annually, alone or in clusters of two or three, on broad-leaf trees, also on stumps, favouring beech, elm and sycamore.

Cap varies in shape but is usually semicircular, kidney-shaped, or fan-shaped. It starts off broadly convex and becomes flat, shallowly or deeply depressed as it matures. The cap is dry and ranges in colour from pale tan to creamy yellowish, with prominent large, flattened, brown to blackish scales that are somewhat arranged radially. The thin margin of the cap is initially curved inward and later becomes even. On the underside, it has whitish cream pores that are made up of tubes packed together closely. The tubes are between 5 and 10 mm long. Stem thick and typically off-center or lateral. It starts off whitish but quickly becomes covered, starting from the base, with a velvety, dark brown to black tomentum. Spore print white.

Microscopic Features: The spores are oblong-ellipsoidal in shape, smooth, and measure approximately 10-15 x 4-5.5µm.

Polyporus squamosus on the Nature First Web site.
Polyporus squamosus on the MushroomExpert.Com Web site.

Many mushrooms are poisonous and some are lethally poisonous. It can be very difficult to distinguish between an edible and a poisonous mushroom. Because of that, we strongly advise against consuming wild mushrooms, and this site does not contain any information about the edibility or toxicity of mushrooms.

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