BRIEF DESCRIPTION: Amanita roanokensis has very narrow spores, which commonly may be more than 4 times as long as they are wide.

The cap is starkly white and 50 - 120 mm wide, convex to plano-convex, sometimes with a slight umbo, white, cream in the center, probably subviscid, with a nonsulcate, appendiculate margin.  The cap is scattered with rather small to large, thin, flat, white, submembranous patches of volva.

The gills are white, adnate or adnexed, and moderately crowded to crowded to rather distant, narrow to moderately broad, and white to pallid.  The short gills are obliquely truncate to attenuate.

The usually exannulate stipe is 70 - 140 x 7 - 20 mm and, subcylindrical or attenuate upward, solid, white, and (at first) flocculose; at the stipe base is a spindle-shaped, somewhat rooting bulb.  A weak annulus may be noticed in young fruiting bodies.  There is a distinct limbate volva at the top of the stipe's basal bulb, but this may be hard to see when it collapses on the stipe.

The spores measure (12.0-) 12.8 - 17.1 (-19.5) x 3.6 - 4.9 (-5.0) µm and are amyloid and cylindrical to bacilliform.  Clamps are not found at bases of basidia.

Amanita roanokensis has an odor that is pleasant or "like cooking meat" at first, but later it is described as "like carrion" or "old bones."

This species is often associated with oak and pine.

It is moderately common in the southern part of the sandy Atlantic coastal plain of the U.S. and along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Bas placed the present species in his stirps Roanokensis along with A. inodora (Murrill) Bas and A. alliacea (Murrill) Murrill.  For a brief statement concerning the related stirpes of Amanita subsection Limbatulae, see A. limbatula Bas.
-- R. E. Tulloss