 The genus is known only from the holotype specimen , a single fruit body ( mushroom ) currently residing in the private collection owned by <unk> <unk> of Turin , Italy . The specimen was collected in one of the amber mines in the <unk> Septentrional area of the island of Hispaniola , in the Dominican Republic . The amber is believed to date from the Miocene <unk> stage , about 20 to 16 million years before the present . It was first studied by a group of researchers consisting of David Hibbett and Michael Donoghue from Harvard University , with David <unk> of the American Museum of Natural History . Hibbett and colleagues published their 1997 type description in the American Journal of <unk> . The generic name Protomycena is derived from a combination of the Latin proto meaning " first " , and " Mycena " , a modern genus that it resembles . The specific epithet electra was coined by the authors from the Latin for " amber " , in reference to the mode of preservation . 
