Fungal spore? ID Help

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Stuart, Glenn

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Mar 17, 2021, 1:37:41 PM3/17/21

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Greetings everyone,

I trust you all are staying safe and weathering the COVID storm as well as possible.

The attached image is a SEM of part of the contents of a 7000-8000 year old calcified cist from a human bone within a Siberian mortuary site. The two upper-central objects look something like Diphyscium, though they are too small for that, based on what I’ve been able to find, anyway. The catenate ones are about the right size for Aspergillus, but I’m not sure about the ornament, maybe Penicillium? Any thoughts you all might have about what these could be, or know of good references to check, would be greatly appreciated. Even narrowing it down to a family would help.

I’ve checked my local source:

Bassett, I. J., C. W. Crompton and J. A. Parmalee 1978. An Atlas of Airborne Pollen Grains and Common Fungus Spores of Canada. Research Branch, Canada Department of Agriculture, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. 321 pages.

And a couple of other sources that were suggested to me:

Taylor, Thomas N., Michael Krings and Edith L. Taylor 2015. 11 - Fungal Spores. In Fossil Fungi, edited by T. N. Taylor, M. Krings and E. L. Taylor, pp. 221-238. Academic Press, San Diego.

Houbraken, J., S. Kocsubé, C. M. Visagie, N. Yilmaz, X. C. Wang, M. Meijer, B. Kraak, V. Hubka, K. Bensch, R. A. Samson and J. C. Frisvad 2020. Classification of Aspergillus, Penicillium, Talaromyces and related genera (Eurotiales): An overview of families, genera, subgenera, sections, series and species. Studies in Mycology 95:5-169.

All thoughts and suggestions would be welcomed.

Yours,

Glenn

Glenn Stuart, Ph.D.

Environmental Archaeologist and Assistant Professor

Graduate Program Chair

University of Saskatchewan

Department of Archaeology and Anthropology

Phone 306-966-4192

I acknowledge that I live and work on Treaty 6 Territory and the Homeland of the Métis. We pay our respect to the First Nations and Métis ancestors of this place and reaffirm our relationship with one another.