Sarcosoma globosum

Description :

Sarcosoma globosum (Schmidel) Casp. 1891 [1896]I'm very psyched about this find. It's a grotesque and rare fungus listed in Red books of most Russian regions, including the Novosibirsk district. This giant ascomycete is essentially a bag containing a clear, odorless, gelatinous substance. This substance supposedly has anti-inflammatory properties and is used as an ointment in traditional medicine for arthritis relief.I found five fruitbodies under large pines not far from the Novosibirsk State University. I hope the patch of forest where it grows doesn't fall victim to the university's megalomanic building plans.*Upd (2011).: the Novosibirsk State University destroyed this area of primeval forest. Instead there will be three ugly tall buildings, a chapel (orthodox christianity has a long history of supporting education, free thought, and all other types of enlightenment, ri-i-ight... the new university rector will do anything, no matter how retarded, to please the two despotic midgets in Moscow who are known for their support of the ongoing invasion of the Russian orthodox church into the lives of normal people) and a large park, right, a park with planted bushes instead of magnificent trees (I can't decide which of the latter two is more outrageous). The ecological evaluation of the territory that allowed the University to cut down the centennial trees was found to have been fixed, there were severe violations (=shortcuts) in the procedure, and a bunch of fat corrupt bureaucratic assholes were fined for "breach of protocol" - about $1000 per head (lol, a tail light on any of their oversized SUVs costs more)... but the investigation was done only after all the trees were cut down. Apparently they don't have enough space in the existing building to teach future accountants, salesmen, office managers, schoolteachers and other moderately incompetent "professionals" the Russian tertiary education has been reduced to producing in most areas of knowledge. I'm a graduate of that university as well and I can say that those were the most uselessly wasted five years of my life - I studied in one of the new departments that the university has been creating over the last decade instead of improving the depressing situation in the departments where there are good traditions and professionals, (e.g. mathematics, physics, or chemistry). The education I got there is worthless - it has no structure, the staff was underqualified or just plain incompetent (most of the faculty had never even done any research work in their respective areas, different branches of linguistics in our case, so basically they were just "overgrown" schoolteachers), and the resources were often outdated (imagine a textbook on the history of the English language written by a senile Soviet lady in the 1960's to get the feeling). I'm planning my postgraduate studies in a completely different area of knowledge and I'm studying by myself.This place is asking for a neutron bomb. It's very scary that it's actually becoming fashionable among my compatriots to be ignorant, superficially religious, destructive and greedy. Knowing something beyond what the state TV channel shows, taking an interest in something that you can't buy, doing something that won't bring direct profit or something that you're not obliged to by law isn't just unpopular and uncommon, it actually causes active fear and hate as something alien and crazy. Sad.