The type species of Cerinomyces: a thin, waxy, pale brown crust on dead wood in the jelly-fungus class Dacrymycetes. Unlike most of its relatives it does not form gelatinous fruit bodies, but it has the same two-armed, tuning-fork basidia. It is easily overlooked and seldom recorded; the first German find was on a weathered pine window frame.
Not edible; a thin crust on dead wood with no food use. No toxicity documented.
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Saprotroph on dead wood of hardwoods and conifers; also on worked timber. The German record was on a pine window frame, where the brown rot was attributed to Gloeophyllum abietinum growing alongside it, not to this fungus.
Distribution
Reported from the USA and Canada, France (Haute-Savoie), Germany (first record 2004) and New Zealand (NZOR, occurrence status unknown). Its distribution is poorly known.
Characteristics
Description from a German collection (Huckfeldt & Hechler 2004). Fruit body: resupinate, thin (90-125 µm), smooth, cracked where thicker, without a distinct margin; patches about 1-2.5 cm. Colour: light brown to ochre or wood-coloured, paler at the edge, with scattered small brownish exudate spots. Hyphae: monomitic, with large clamps at almost all septa; a loose basal layer of thick-walled hyphae 3-5 µm wide and a compact upper layer of thin-walled hyphae 2-3 µm wide. Basidia: tuning-fork shaped (two epibasidia), 14-26 x 4-6 µm, with a basal clamp; no cystidia or hyphidia. Spores: allantoid (sausage-shaped), smooth, hyaline, unseptate, 7.5-9 x 3-3.5 µm. Huckfeldt & Hechler call the spore walls thick, while Savchenko et al. (2021) characterize the genus by mostly thin-walled spores.
