The world's most popular 'magic mushroom' has a wild African cousin nobody recognized
For years, growers of psychedelic mushrooms have cultivated a strain known as "NSS" (Natal super strength) or "Transkei," prized for its potency and ease of cultivation. Everyone assumed it was a variant of Psilocybe cubensis, the world's most widely grown magic mushroom. It is not. It is a separate species entirely, and its discovery is rewriting the evolutionary history of the genus.
In a paper published in Proceedings B of the Royal Society, researchers from Stellenbosch University, Clark University, the University of Utah Health, Duke University, and the Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe describe Psilocybe ochraceocentrata, named for the ochre-yellow coloring at the center of its cap. The species grows in the grasslands of South Africa and Zimbabwe and last shared a common ancestor with P. cubensis approximately 1.5 million years ago.
An origin story overturned
The prevailing view of P. cubensis held that it was an African species inadvertently introduced to the Americas when Europeans brought cattle to the continents in the 1500s. P. cubensis grows on animal dung, and the cattle hypothesis provided a tidy explanation for how a dung-loving mushroom ended up in Cuba, where it was first described in 1906.
The new molecular dating complicates this story. A 1.5-million-year divergence between the two species predates human agriculture, let alone transatlantic cattle transport, by more than a million years. Around 1.5 million years ago, grasslands were diversifying in South America and grazing herbivores were expanding out of Africa into Eurasia. These ecological shifts likely opened niches that allowed P. cubensis and P. ochraceocentrata to evolve separately on different continents.
Breyten van der Merwe, a mycologist and PhD student in chemical engineering at Stellenbosch University and co-author on the study, noted that despite their similar appearance, the two species have different genetic, ecological, and chemical traits.
DNA from historic specimens tells the story
The team used DNA extracted from collections across southern Africa, including historic type specimens, to conduct multi-locus phylogenetic analyses and molecular clock dating. They also performed ecological niche modeling to reconstruct the environmental conditions under which each species likely evolved.
Cathy Sharp of the Natural History Museum of Zimbabwe found some of the first specimens of P. ochraceocentrata back in 2013. But the species was never formally described until now. Africa remains heavily undersampled for fungal diversity, and the continent's contribution to the global understanding of psilocybin-producing mushrooms has been limited by a lack of systematic collection and genetic analysis.
What this means for psychedelic research
The discovery provides new genetic resources for research on psilocybin-producing mushrooms at a time when clinical interest in psychedelics is surging. P. ochraceocentrata has different chemical characteristics from P. cubensis, which could be relevant for researchers investigating how psilocybin content and related alkaloid profiles vary across species.
It also highlights how much remains unknown about psychedelic mushroom diversity. If one of the most widely cultivated strains in the world was actually a different species and nobody noticed until now, what else is growing in undersampled regions?
Limitations of the study
The molecular clock dating provides an estimate, not a precise date, for the divergence. Calibration of molecular clocks in fungi is notoriously difficult, and the 1.5-million-year figure carries uncertainty. The ecological niche modeling depends on assumptions about past climate conditions that are themselves reconstructions.
The study also does not characterize the full chemical profile of P. ochraceocentrata or compare its psychoactive properties systematically with P. cubensis in controlled settings. The "Natal super strength" reputation is anecdotal, based on grower reports rather than standardized assays.
What the study does establish clearly is that this is a distinct species with a deep evolutionary separation from its domesticated cousin. For a field that is rapidly expanding, both scientifically and commercially, getting the taxonomy right matters.