Belonia Körb.
Type : Belonia russula Körb ex Nyl.
Description : Thallus crustose, ±apparent, sometimes pulverulent, pale, often effuse and poorly developed. Photobiont green, Trentepohlia, or rarely Trebouxia. Ascomata apothecia resembling perithecia. Exciple hyaline. Hamathecium of paraphyses, more or less staining blue in iodine, lacking periphyses. Asci unitunicate, thin-walled with neither an apical thickening nor an apical apparatus. Ascospores hyaline, relatively long, acicular or narrowly fusiform, with transverse septa, or submuriform with attenuate apices. Conidiomata unknown.
Belonia, a small genus of uncertain affinities presently included in the family Gyalectaceae (Eriksson et al. 2004; Pennycook & Galloway 2004; Eriksson 2005), is characterised by a pale, crustose or pulverulent thallus, closed and largely hyaline apothecia (resembling perithecia), simple paraphyses, thin-walled asci and long, multiseptate to muriform ascospores and a green photobiont belonging to Trentepohlia or, more rarely, to Trebouxia. The genus currently comprises 12 species (Kirk et al. 2001) with most species occurring in the Northern Hemisphere and three being found in the Southern Hemisphere. European taxa are discussed by Navarro-Rosinés & Llimona (1997), and a new species from Tasmania was recorded by McCarthy & Kantvilas (1997) and later shown to be present also in Nothofagus dombeyi forest in Argentina (Messuti et al. 1999). Two species are currently known from New Zealand (Malcolm & Coppins 1997; Coppins & Malcolm 1998). Because of their small thalli and ascomata, species of the genus were until very recently overlooked in the Southern Hemisphere.
