Aspiciliopsis macrophthalma

Aspiciliopsis macrophthalma is a species of lichen-forming fungus in the family Trapeliaceae. It is a crust-forming lichen with a thick, brittle-looking thallus that spreads across rock as a cream to pale pinkish-grey patch. The surface is usually continuous but often breaks into sharp-edged cracks, giving it a broken "paving" look, and it can be faintly roughened and patchily dusted with a thin whitish bloom (pruina). Its fruiting bodies are apothecia that sit mostly embedded in the thallus (an aspicilioid form): small, round pits with a pale to dark reddish-brown (sometimes almost blackish) disc, and a thallus-coloured rim that is neatly set off from the surrounding crust by a crack. The thallus also contains embedded cephalodia that may be easiest to pick out when wet, when they can turn a dark purplish-blue and look slightly different in texture from the rest of the thallus.

Under the microscope, the species has a tall, colourless hymenium and produces colourless, broadly ellipsoid ascospores arranged in a single row within each ascus; it also forms long, thread-like conidia in its asexual structures. Molecular work has supported treating Aspiciliopsis as a separate genus rather than leaving the species in Placopsis, because it is more closely related to Orceolina than to other Placopsis species. Chemically, it produces several lichen substances, with 5-O-methylhiascic acid reported as the main compound, alongside smaller amounts of gyrophoric, hiascic, and lecanoric acids.