It is a lactarius, although I havn't actually seen any milk from the mushroom. It is the same size & shape as L. deliciosus, and from the top, it looks almost identical to it. However, they immediately stain blue when broken, and this turns into green after several hours. The cap color is slightly paler than a deliciosus, with faint rosy-colored hues covering a small portion of the caps. check out the pics.
Noboby seems to know, but this is not surprising since you know as much (if not more) than anybody else in this forum. Do you have the book "Mushrooms Demystified"? If so, we could try to trace through the Lactarius idenfication key (on p. 65 in my book). It would be a good learning experience for me.
This is from the mycologist David Fischer regarding the find: "I think that the best you're gonna' do is to assign it the name "L. hemicyaneus" and recognize that "absolute" identification of these specimens is really not possible. If you see this thing again, I'd encourage you to try to get more specimens and take solid field notes and get more and better photos. I'm sure Andy Methven or anyone else doing serious taxonomic studies in the genus would love to have a well-documented collection of this."
Mr Yes, that's a very interesting mushroom you have there. And what's so unusual is the distinctiveness of the colors. I'd think that such a mushroom, if it was already in the literature, would be rather easy to key out. Yet I've spent half this morning trying to do just that without any luck at all. Nice find ;-)
