The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi Keith Seifert Greystone Books, $27.95
Take a walk through the woods after it rains, and you can catch a glimpse of the incredible diversity of fungi. You might spot the real-life version of the red-and-white “power-up” mushroom from the video game Super Mario Bros. or the aptly named dead man’s fingers, a blackened fungal growth that resembles a hand emerging from the grave. Perhaps you’ll notice a cluster of frilly pink shelves on a log or a striking purple mushroom that’s a doppelgänger for underwater coral.
But for all that you can see, you’ve barely scratched the surface of the fungal world.
Scientists estimate there are between 1.5 million and 15 million species of fungi but so far have discovered and named only 140,000 or so. Most of that identification was performed with microscopes, but over the last two decades, DNA sequencing has allowed researchers to distinguish large numbers of microfungi. It’s these rarely noticed and poorly understood fungi that mycologist Keith Seifert focuses on in his book The Hidden Kingdom of Fungi.
Seifert has spent his career “obsessing over Latin names of fungi” but recognizes that taxonomy may not come easily to his readers. So he begins with a note on scientific names, explaining why they’re a “necessary evil” and providing a primer on the modern classification system, likening it to “a phone book for looking up the evolutionary address of a fungus.”
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