ABSTRACT
The vertebrate body can be divided into soft and hard tissues: The former category is composed of muscles, internal organs, veins, and blood, and the latter is composed of bones, hair, horns, hooves, nails, feathers, and bills. Where a cadaver has been left to decompose on the ground and has not been scavenged before or during decomposition, the soft tissues can readily disappear, consumed mainly by invertebrates and bacteria, while the hard tissues endure. Probably for this reason, the hard tissues have long been known to support a specialized group of fungi adapted to this substratum: keratinophilic fungi (Hudson 1972). In contrast, the soft tissues have only relatively recently been shown to yield a particular group of fungi after their disappearance (Sagara 1976b). Similarly, feces, especially of herbivores, have long been known to bear coprophilous fungi (Webster 1970) as they endure, whereas urine and readily decomposing feces have only recently been shown to yield a specific group of fungi (Sagara 1975). These two new groups of fungi are in fact almost identical in species composition and successional development. The present chapter focuses on this neglected aspect of nature and its forensic potential.
