During the last thirty years phylogenetic analyses based on molecular characters have developed from simple single-locus studies into complicated surveys containing multi-locus phyloge- nies, species trees and possibilities to evaluate the evolutionary history of characters. This has been an exciting era for systema- tists, including fungal taxonomists. The majority of lichenized taxa have originally been described using morphological charac- ters s. lat. (i.e. traits related to morphology, anatomy and chemis- try), and thus the congruence between traditional species description and species delimitation based on their molecular evolutionary history remains a challenge. The use of morpho- logical characters has not been abandoned, as predicted or advo- cated by some researchers (Lumbsch & Leavitt 2011; Hibbett et al. 2016). However, we now know that the morphology-based approach to species recognition has also been demonstrated in several cases to substantially misrepresent diversity, as it either underestimates the occurrence of cryptic species (Altermann et al. 2014; Boluda et al. 2016) or, on the contrary, overestimates the true diversity due to high levels of intra-specific morpho- logical and chemical variation (Leavitt et al. 2011; Velmala et al. 2014). Therefore, morphological characters continue to be useful for the delimitation of species, but only if their discrimina- tive ability has been verified using phylogenetic analyses.