“This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought ? our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography ? breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other.  This passage quotes a “certain Chinese encyclopaedia” in which it is written that “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs,(e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) etcetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.”  In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.” --Michel Foucault

These fungi have had a controversial taxonomic history and have played a central role in phylogenetic arguments on the origin of higher fungi, whensome mycologists believed them to be derived from floridean red algae. In addition a few were considered to be insect-parasitic worms when they were first discovered. Members of four families (Herpomycetaceae, Laboulbeniaceae, Ceratomycetaceae, Euceratomycetaceae) are obligate biotrophs of insects, mites, and millipedes. A fifth family that has been included in the order by some workers, Pyxidiophoraceae, is morphologically distinct because the species produce mycelium and are mycoparasites in the filamentous stage with an arthropod-associated phoretic stage that may be biotrophic. The link between Laboulbeniales and Pyxidiophoraceae first was suggested on the basis of comparative life histories and common morphology of asci development and ascospores. More recently phylogenetic analysis of molecular characters has supported the relationship.  However, althought the clade is excluded from the main group of perithical ascomycetes, its position among loculoascomycetes and discomycetes is not well resolved.

There is little information on  relationships within the Laboulbeniales, although Pyxidiophoraceae occurs as the sister taxon of species of two families (Herpomycetaceae and Laboulbeniaceae) based on phylogenetic analysis of characters derived from small subunit ribosomal DNA (Blackwell, M. 1994. Minute mycological mysteries: The influence of arthropods on the lives of fungi. Mycologia 86:1-17).

Table 1. Approximate number of species collected from megadiversity countries (McNeely, J. A.,  K.R. Miller, W. V. Reid, R. A. Werner, and T. B. Werner. 1990. Conserving the world’s biological diversity. International Union for the Conservation of Nature. Gland, Switzerland).