Summary:
Features include tiny, reddish brown to blackish, urceolate cups, with grayish to whitish spore-bearing surface, the margin becoming fringed, hard consistency, little or no stem, growth on willow, and microscopic characters.
There are several collections from BC at the Pacific Forestry Center, one determined by J. Groves in 1964. Collections were examined from ON, SK, CO, NY, Finland, Germany, and Sweden, (Groves(3)).
Upper surface:
apothecia [sexual fruitbodies] 0.05-0.12cm across and about the same high, at first nearly spherical, opening circularly and becoming urceolate [goblet-shaped]; spore-bearing surface concave, more fleshy than the exterior, grayish to whitish; margin fimbriate [fringed]; conidial fruitbodies "erumpent, densely gregarious, separate to subcespitose", about 0.01-0.05cm across, more or less spherical to ovoid, black, bald, similar in consistency to the apothecia
Flesh:
consistency of fruitbody hard, coriaceous-waxy [leathery-waxy], more coriaceous-flesh when moist
Underside:
dark reddish brown to blackish; "more or less fibrillose-striate to slightly ridged, somewhat furfuraceous"
Stem:
sessile [without a stem] or narrowed in lower part to substipitate [with rudimentary stem]
Microscopic:
spores (40)55-80(90) x (1.5)2.0-3.5(4.0) microns, filiform [thread-like], "more or less curved to nearly straight, pointed at ends", colorless, mostly 5-septate to 7-(9-)septate, fasciculate to somewhat interwoven in the ascus; asci 8-spored, (90)105-135(150) x (8)9-12(14) microns, cylindric to cylindric-clavate, tapering in lower part to a slender stem, pore blue with iodine; paraphyses 1.5-2.5 microns wide, filiform, colorless, septate, simple or branched, "the tips not or very slightly swollen, not forming an epithecium"; conidia (18)20-30(36) x (2.0)2.5-3.5 microns, "elongate-fusiform, straight or curved", colorless, mostly 3-septate; conidiophores about 6-25 x 2-2.5 microns or longer, "cylindric-subulate, septate, simple or branched"; microconidia 3.0-4.0(5.0) x 2.0-3.0 microns, elliptic, colorless, 1-celled
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