Rare fungus 'arrived on WWI boots'

13 January 2014 Last updated at 00:09 GMT

Rare fungus may have arrived on WWI soldiers' boots

There are very few records of the fungi Clavulinopsis cinereoides in Europe

A rare fungus discovered near a former Edinburgh war hospital may have been unwittingly brought to the area by World War One soldiers.

The fungi Clavulinopsis cinereoides - rarely seen in Europe - has been spotted for the first time in Scotland.

Ecologist Abbie Patterson made the discovery on a lawn at Napier University's Craiglockhart Campus.

She said 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.

Spores of C cinereoides could have been picked up on soldiers' boots from Flanders fields and deposited on grass around the military hospital in Edinburgh

Ms 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."

Ms Patterson discovered the species whilst working on a contract to catalogue biodiversity amongst plants, birds, mammals, lichens and invertebrates for Edinburgh Napier University.

Head of the 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.

"The potential link with the likes of Owen and Sassoon is particularly exciting."