What can fungal spores tell us?
Sporormiella is an ascomycete genus (of about 70 species) in the so-called “flask fungi” group. To the naked eye the fruiting bodies are tiny black dots, each less than half a millimetre in diameter. Each such dot is a hemispherical, ascus-containing chamber (or perithecium). As a genus Sporormiella is cosmopolitan and is very common on the dung of both wild and domestic herbivores and could be looked at as an indicator of herbivore density. The Commandini & Rinaldi paper listed below summarizes some of the work using fungal spores and notes that studies of a North American site have shown that “Sporormiella spores may serve as a proxy for the presence and decline of megagfauna at a given site, and for the subsequent introduction of grazing animals in historic times”. That paper also summarizes similar studies on the megafauna of Madagascar and those studies are given in detail in the other paper listed below. Madagascar once supported giant lemurs, elephant birds, pygmy hippopotami an
