Possibly the unknown cantharellales from dickie et al. 2010? No idea really, since all we know is that it should be a white crust.

The morphology is distinct from my other recent crust fungi -- has relatively little sense of structure.

Microscopy is in Melzer's on somewhat dry material -- it did not wet well in KOH. Clear basidia and clamp connections present. Spores around 4 um long x 2.7 um wide, smooth, ovoid.

Thought I would have uploaded this at the time, but apparently not. It's from the Rakiura Stewart Island fungal foray, and it goes with PDD 119763. The last two photos show the mummified grubs in the mushy rotten wood. They were unidentifiable pupae, leathery and tough with mycelium. This was identified at the time as Cordyceps but by now it might be put over in Ophiocordyceps, not sure. The mummies were relatively large, certainly bigger than the fruitbody. Once were huhu grubs? Not sure.

Searching for the unknown sistotrema.

Added more microscopy on 19 May.

This fungus was abundant on pine needles and on the underside of a rock under Pinus radiata. It has a noticeable sporulation layer (thicker wooly-white) and areas of vegetative hyphae (less densely wooly).

Microscopy (in 10% KOH) reveals clamp connections (so Basidiomycete), highly ornamented hyphae, and quite simple spores. The basidia are hard to get good images of, but appear to be embedded in a layer with longer ornamented cystidia protruding (visible under both stereo and compound microscopy). There is some possibility that the spores are attached by a small "string-like" connector -- but I haven't yet gotten good images. No reaction to Melzer's.

The hyphae are reminiscent of Tylospora (a possible identity) but the two known species of Tylospora have very distinct spores. The other likely possibility is Tomentella, but again the spores do not match at all (I did see a singular spore that looked like Tomentella and darkened in Melzer's -- but it was clearly a contaminant).

We know there is a Hydnaceae species that is abundant in DNA under pines, but has not been collected (and is only known from a single collection in North America). This remains a likely identity for this specimen. The spores of Hydnum are quite similar to what I am observing here.

Working on sequencing and getting a culture....