Malmidea furfurosa was originally introduced by
William Nylander in 1863 as
Lecidea furfurosa, with Nylander explicitly attributing the name to
Edward Tuckerman; hence the
basionym is cited as "Tuck. ex Nyl.", which in
botanical authorship means Tuckerman proposed the name but Nylander effected the
valid publication. In the protologue Nylander compared Tuckerman's
taxon with
Persoon's Lecidea furfuracea, and characterised
L. furfurosa by a thin grey-granular bark-dwelling
thallus composed of minute spherical granules on a dark to blackish , medium (≈1 mm) flat, marginate
apothecia with a blackish rim, and simple, colourless,
ellipsoid-shaped
ascospores (eight per
ascus) about 12–18 μm long. He based the name on Tuckerman's material and cited Cuban collections by
Charles Wright among the original material (a Cuban Wright gathering has been treated as type material in later work).
Klaus Kalb and
Robert Lücking reclassified it in
Malmidea in 2011. Kalb and colleagues showed that the tropical
Lecidea piperis/
Lecanora granifera assemblage, including the species long known as
Lecidea furfurosa, forms a well-supported
clade distinct from the
type species of
Malcolmiella; on that evidence they erected
Malmidea for this
lineage and made the
new combination Malmidea furfurosa. The clade sits as
sister to, but apart from,
Ectolechiaceae and is set off by simple (one-celled), haloed spores, asci lacking a tubular tholus, and thalli often built of goniocysts, so the authors placed
Malmidea in a new family,
Malmideaceae. ==References==