Timothy J. Baroni, Distinguished Professor Emeritus, Biological Sciences, with Todd Osmundson, a mycological colleague and professor in biology at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, had their paper on a new eye-catching rose-pink variety of the Bear’s Head Tooth Fungus published in the journal Mycologia. This very rarely collected species was documented by citizen naturalists from northeastern U.S. and eastern Canada only 11 times from 2017 to 2022. The mycophiles who found collections of this bright pink tooth fungus were responding to a request by Baroni in his 2017 field guide (Mushrooms of the northeastern United States and eastern Canada) for information and collections of this highly colored variant of the typical all white form of Hericium americanum. Baroni has never collected or seen this fungus in his 50 years of field work, but learned about this rarity from a single collection documented in the technical literature in 1973. Osmundson confirmed the identity of the collections provided by the citizen naturalists using molecular DNA markers, and Baroni produced the macro description, standard light microscope and scanning electron microscope images and descriptions of the new variety. Also, a first for Baroni and Osmundson, a color image of the new variety in their article was selected by the editorial staff of the Mycologia for the cover image on the January 2026 volume.