Entoloma Sinuatum

''Entoloma sinuatum'' ( commonly known as the livid entoloma, livid agaric, livid pinkgill, leaden entoloma, and lead poisoner) is a poisonous mushroom found across Europe and North America. Some guidebooks refer to it by its older scientific names of ''Entoloma lividum'' or ''Rhodophyllus sinuatus''. The largest mushroom of the genus of pink-spored fungi known as '' Entoloma'', it is also the type species. Appearing in late summer and autumn, fruit bodies are found in deciduous woodlands on clay or chalky soils, or nearby parklands, sometimes in the form of fairy rings. Solid in shape, they resemble members of the genus ''Tricholoma''. The ivory to light grey-brown cap is up to across with a margin that is rolled inward. The sinuate gills are pale and often yellowish, becoming pink as the spores develop. The thick whitish stem has no ring.

When young, it may be mistaken for the edible St George's mushroom (''Calocybe gambosa'') or the miller ('' Clitopilus prunulus''). It has been responsible for many cases of mushroom poisoning in Europe. ''E. sinuatum'' causes primarily gastrointestinal problems that, though not generally life-threatening, have been described as highly unpleasant. Delirium and depression are uncommon sequelae. It is generally not considered to be lethal, although one source has reported deaths from the consumption of this mushroom.

Name and relationships

The saga of this species' name begins in 1788 with the publication of part 8 of Jean Baptiste Bulliard's ''Herbier de la France''. In it was plate 382, representing a mushroom which he called ''Agaricus lividus''. In 1872, Lucien Quélet took up a species which he called "'' Entoloma lividus'' Bull."; although all subsequent agree that this is a fairly clear reference to Bulliard's name, Quélet gave a description that is generally considered to be that of a different species from Bulliard's. In the meantime, 1801 had seen the description of ''Agaricus sinuatus'' by Christian Persoon in his ''Synopsis Methodica Fungorum''. He based that name on another plate (number 579) published in the last part of Bulliard's work, and which the latter had labelled "agaric sinué".Which means that under the modern principles of nomenclature, Persoon, not Bulliard, is the first to have used the name, since only names in Latin can be considered. German mycologist Paul Kummer reclassified it as ''Entoloma sinuatum'' in 1871.

For many years Quélet's name and description were treated as valid because Bulliard's name antedated Persoon's. However, in 1950, a change in the ''International Code of Botanical Nomenclature'' (termed the Stockholm Code, after the city where the International Botanical Congress was being held) caused only names on fungi published after 1801 or 1821 (depending on their type) to be valid. This meant that suddenly Bulliard's name was no longer a valid name, and now it was Persoon's name that had priority. Nonetheless, it was a well-known name, and the already chaotic situation caused by a change to a famous Latin name was further complicated by another of Quélet's suggestions. He had in 1886 proposed a new, broader genus that included all pink-gilled fungi with adnate or sinuate gills and angular spores: ''Rhodophyllus''. These two approach to genus placement, using either ''Rhodophyllus'' or ''Entoloma'', coexisted for many decades, with mycologists and guidebooks following either; Henri Romagnesi, who studied the genus for over forty years, favoured ''Rhodophyllus'', as initially did Rolf Singer. However, most other authorities have tended to favor ''Entoloma'', and Singer conceded the name was far more widely used and adopted it for his ''Agaricales in Modern Taxonomy'' text in 1986.

In the meantime, it had been widely accepted that the 1950 change to the Stockholm Code caused more problems than they solved, and in 1981, the Sydney Code reinstated the validity of pre-1801 names, but created the status of sanctioned name for those used in the foundational works of Persoon and Elias Magnus Fries. Thus ''Entoloma sinuatum'', which Fries had sanctioned, still had to be used for the species described by Quélet even though Bulliard's name was the older one. At about the same time, Machiel Noordeloos re-examined Bulliard's name in more details, and discovered that not only was it illegitimate (and thus not available for use) because William Hudson had already used it ten years earlier for a different species, but Bulliard's illustration was clearly not an ''Entoloma'', but a species of '' Pluteus'',It is now generally accepted the species in question is ''Pluteus cervinus''. a genus that is only distantly related to ''Entoloma''. As this made Quélet's name definitely unusable for the ''Entoloma'', and because at the time he and Romagnesi believed there were ground to treat Quélet's "''E. lividum''" and Persoon's ''E. sinuatum'' as separate species, he had to coin a third name for Quélet's species: ''Entoloma eulividum''. He however later changed his mind on this issue, combining again his own ''Entoloma eulividum'' and ''E. sinuatum'', so that Persoon's name is now universally recognised. Because it was previously widely used and Quélet had provided a good description and illustration (which, the proposer argued, was better considered as a new species rather than a mere placement of Bulliard's name in another genus), a proposal was made in 1999 to conserve ''Entoloma lividum'' and thus restore its use. However, it failed because ''E. sinuatum'' had already been in use (if not universally) for many years and was thus a well-known name for the species.

The specific epithet ''sinuatum'' is the Latin for "wavy", referring to the shape of the cap, while the generic name is derived from the Ancient Greek words ''entos/ἐντός'' "inner" and ''lóma/λῶμα'' "fringe" or "hem" from the inrolled margin. The specific epithet ''lividum'' was derived from the Latin word ''līvǐdus'' "lead-coloured". The various common names include livid entoloma, livid agaric, livid pinkgill, leaden entoloma, lead poisoner, and grey pinkgill. In the Dijon region of France it was known as ''le grand empoisonneur de la Côte-d'Or

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