Summary:
Features include 1) minute fruitbodies on dung with the spore-bearing upper surface convex, pale violet, and dotted with dark violet or blackish tips of asci, 2) exterior that is pale violet and smooth, 3) absent stem, and 4) microscopic characters. Saccobolus versicolor is variable in size, pigmentation, spore size and ornamentation.

Microscopic:
spores 13-21.5(23.5) x 6.5-9.5(10) microns, elliptic-fusiform or more rarely fusiform-elliptic, very rarely nearly round or round, "often asymmetrical, subtrigonal or ventricose, with blunt ends", "smooth, finely warted or with small pits and short more or less reticulating fissures", "with common or individual, lateral, mucilaginous substance", at first colorless, then pinkish violet, finally violet, purplish brown or purplish gray, spores clustered; asci 8-spored, (80)100-145 x 22-37 microns, broadly clavate, the wall deep blue in Melzer''s reagent; paraphyses 2-3 microns thick, filiform [thread-like], branched, septate, not, slightly, or strongly enlarged in upper part, up to 7.5 microns wide at tip, colorless, often with amorphous violet intercellular pigment between the upper parts; amorphous intracellular violaceous pigment of variable amount between cells of excipulum, but excipulum may be poorly developed, (Brummelen)

Notes:
It is found at least in OR, ID, CA, and CO, (Larsen). Collections were examined from OR, ID, ON, CA, CO, CT, HI, ME, NJ, NY, TX, Austria, Belgium, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Romania, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, (Brummelen). There is a collection from BC at the University of British Columbia identified by R. Bandoni in 1960 (as Saccobolus violascens) on elk dung.

Synonyms and Alternate Names:
Saccobolus violascens Boud.
Solenia candida Pers.
Solenia polyporoidea (Peck) Burt