Clavaria zollingeri, commonly known as the violet coral or the magenta coral, is a widely distributed species of fungus. It produces striking tubular, purple to pinkish-violet fruit bodies that grow up to tall and wide. The extreme tips of the fragile, slender branches are usually rounded and brownish. A typical member of the clavarioid or club fungi, Clavaria zollingeri is saprobic, and so derives nutrients by breaking down organic matter. The fruit bodies are typically found growing on the ground in woodland litter, or in grasslands. Variations in branching and color can often be used to distinguish C. zollingeri from similarly colored coral fungi such as Alloclavaria purpurea and Clavulina amethystina, although microscopy is required to reliably identify the latter species. Taxonomy and phylogeny The species was first described scientifically by French mycologist Joseph-Henri Léveillé in 1846. It was named after Swiss botanist Heinrich Zollinger, who researched the genus Clavaria, and collected the type specimen in Java, Indonesia. Léveillé considered the dichotomous branching to be the prominent characteristic that separated this species from the otherwise similar Clavaria amethystina. American Charles Horton Peck published a species collected from Stow, Massachusetts as Clavaria lavendula in 1910, but this is a synonym. The mushroom is commonly known as the "violet coral", or the "magenta coral". In a 1978 classification of the genus Clavaria, Ronald Petersen placed C. zollingeri in the subgenus Clavaria, a grouping of species with clamp connections absent from all septa in the fruit body; others in the subgenus included C. purpurea, C. fumosa, and the type, C. vermicularis. A large-scale molecular analysis of the phylogenetic distributions and limits of clavarioid fungi in the family Clavariaceae was published by Bryn Dentiger and David McLaughlin in 2006. Based on their analysis of ribosomal DNA sequences, C. zollingeri shared the greatest genetic similarity with Clavulinopsis laeticolor. Petersen's concept of the infrageneric classification of Clavaria was largely rejected in this analysis, as two of the three subgenera he proposed were found to be polyphyletic. Description The coloring of the fruit bodies is quite variable, ranging from violet to amethyst, or violet shaded with brown or red. The colors may be variable over the fruit body; in one instance the outside branches were brown while the inner branches in the center of the bundle were light violet. Dried specimens may lose their coloring almost entirely, as the pigments may be sensitive to light or dryness.