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Excerpts from Jim Conrad's
Naturalist Newsletter
from the September 6, 2009 Newsletter, issued from the Siskiyou Mountains west of Grants Pass, Oregon:
COMMON EARTHBALL
More "little brown potatoes" grew beneath some lilies in one of Anita's raised boxes but once I'd been sensitized to earthballs I began questioning whether they were the same thing, for they were consistently smaller and with a more mottled skin, as you can see above.
As soon as I picked one I could tell that it was much softer and lighter than the earthballs. However, neither did these show signs of producing an escape hole for the spores. A cross-section is shown below:
This one's skin is much thinner, there's a thick, white "stem" area, and the spore mass, or gleba, is brown instead of dark purple. Searching beneath the lilies I found old ones showing that upon maturity the fungus's fruiting body cracks and the resulting fragments peal back fairly haphazardly, enabling the spores to escape.
*UPDATE: I had trouble identifying this species, because I was so sure it wasn't an earthball. In 2024 when I uploaded the above pictures to the iNaturalist website, the AI automatic identifier seemed convinced it was indeed an earthball, apparently made lighter because the purple, grain part inside had matured into brown, dusty spores. Among Scleroderma earthball species occurring in this part of the world, ours match those labeled SCLERODERMA CITRINUM, known as Common Earthballs.
Scleroderma citrinum occurs fairly worldwide but mainly is documented in western Europe and North America, including Mexico. It grows on the ground or on decaying wood. Unlike so many puffballs, this earthball is described as toxic.