This fungus produced a good number of perithecia on dung of roe deer, Capreolus capreolus, collected in a marshy clearing in a Betula/Salix wood, with Sphagnum, Polytrichum and Phragmites nearby. The dung had been incubated for a little over three weeks.
I have read with interest the various threads on ASCOFrance concerning these sometimes confusing polysporous Podospora species. After much deliberation I am fairly confident that this is Podospora granulostriata. These are the reasons:
* Perithecia mostly-immersed and with stiff, non-agglutinated hairs at the neck. I appreciate this still leaves a number of other 'possibles'.
* Number of spores per ascus; I did a careful calculation based on the area of the spore mass in the left hand mature ascus in the attached image, divided by the area of an individual spore at the same scale. The result was a factor of over x200; so allowing for slight flattening beneath the coverslip a total of 512 spores seems highly likely, certainly much higher than 256 spores.
* Spore dimensions: 20.7-22 x 13-14µm.
* Granulose spore appendages, easier to see than to photograph, but an example can be seen here.
* I have noticed in a different thread that Michel Delpont has commented on contrictions at the septa of the hairs being significant; I observed that feature here.
* Habitat: Lundqvist in SymbolBot.Upsal vol. 20 (1972) comments: "All examined gatherings, certainly the German and Hungarian too, have been found in forests, and it is likely that P. granulostriataprefers this milieu and cervid dung".

As always comments and opinions would be very welcome.
Amitiés
Chris