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Rare fungus discovered in Scotland | |
(35 minutes later) | |
A rare fungus has been discovered for the first time in Scotland, near a former war hospital in Edinburgh. | |
The fungi Clavulinopsis cinereoides is rarely seen in Europe. | |
Ecologist Abbie Patterson made the discovery on a lawn at Napier University's Craiglockhart Campus. | Ecologist Abbie Patterson made the discovery on a lawn at Napier University's Craiglockhart Campus. |
He was working on a contract to catalogue biodiversity amongst plants, birds, mammals, lichens and invertebrates for the university. | |
He told BBC Scotland he had come up with a "quirky theory" that soldiers' boots may have picked up spores while tramping the fields of Flanders. | |
During World War One the university campus site served as a military hospital where the war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were famously treated. | During World War One the university campus site served as a military hospital where the war poets Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were famously treated. |
Mr Patterson said: "Looking at an old photograph of First World War officers standing on the grass banking where I found the fungi, my thoughts turned to the question of how the species arrived here at all. | Mr Patterson said: "Looking at an old photograph of First World War officers standing on the grass banking where I found the fungi, my thoughts turned to the question of how the species arrived here at all. |
"I thought of the soldiers' boots trampling the devastated fields of Flanders and perhaps picking up spores of C cinereoides and then depositing them on that grassy bank below the old Hydropathic." | "I thought of the soldiers' boots trampling the devastated fields of Flanders and perhaps picking up spores of C cinereoides and then depositing them on that grassy bank below the old Hydropathic." |
However, he told the Good Morning Scotland radio programme his theory was not backed up by scientific evidence. | |
Head of the university contract, Jamie Pearson, said: "This discovery was most unexpected. | |
"The fungus has now been accepted and entered into the records as a first for Scotland and the specimen is now with the Royal Edinburgh Botanic Garden Herbarium and is the only specimen they have of this species." | |