Hello all
I’ve been reluctant to leap in here, but here goes…
The good news is that you clearly have a species of Penicillium. That’s most of the good news.
The bad news is that there are lots (maybe hundreds) of species, which have been studied almost exclusively in pure culture. That makes things look a bit different (and so would you, if you’d spent your entire life in jelly). Almost any species might be found on dung. Information on growth rates in defined conditions, metabolite production as well as micromorphology would normally be expected, not to mention DNA. If you’re feeling brave, you could investigate the online key here – http://penicillium.mycobank.org/ You may need to make some more detailed measurements of spores, conidiogenous cells etc.
The slightly better news is that there are relatively few species that produce synnemata (called coremia in the Penicillium world for some reason). Your species might be P. vulpinum (the preferred name, not claviforme). However, in my experience the synnemata tend to be more robust (though that could be a culture-related phenomenon). Another option might be P. ulaiense (see e.g. https://www.forestryimages.org/browse/detail.cfm?imgnum=1570453) which is best known as a deteriogen of citrus fruit but could occur in all sorts of habitats. There are others…
My best advice would be to identify this as Penicillium sp., and mention P. vulpinum and P. ulaiense as possible IDs in the notes.
