Alfred Drummond-Herdman is possibly the only person in the UK who receives animal faeces in the post out of goodwill. His Edinburgh bedroom is a veritable shrine to dung: clothes have been evicted from his wardrobe and cupboards, replaced by terrariums and plastic containers housing sections of cowpats, grouse droppings, and rabbit pellets.

“I have a very understanding housemate,” he says, which is one way to describe living with a man who keeps a dung museum in his bedroom.

But what emerges from those containers has turned the 27-year-old trainee lawyer into a natural history sensation on social media: brightly coloured contortions of fungi, photographed every 30 seconds as they develop, creating timelapses viewed by millions around the world. Inkcaps, fieldcaps, and ascobolus - which look a bit like barnacles - all sprout from the dung he collects, including two new species he has formally identified, with more on the way. These extraordinary images offer a rare glimpse into a world that surrounds us all but few ever see.

Drummond-Herdman is a self-taught amateur taxonomist who became fascinated with coprophilous fungi - fungi that grows on dung - while walking in the Ochil Hills on the edge of Stirling during the pandemic. Cowpats from highland cattle, like many other herbivores, are home to thousands of fungal spores, which race to fruit and produce mushrooms from the moment the dung is deposited.

“In Scotland one summer, I came across cowpats that had all sorts of mushrooms growing from them. It was like a forest. It was so bizarre, you could not miss it. I went online to identify them, and that was really the beginning of the rabbit hole that I have been going down ever since,” he says.

According to estimates by Kew, at least 2 million fungal species are waiting to be discovered worldwide. From his Edinburgh bedroom, Drummond-Herdman is doing his bit, working with other enthusiasts and experts on forums to study and identify British specimens. He has attracted more than 60,000 followers on Instagram, with some posts getting millions of views. Among the most recent is a video of a slime mould known as dog’s vomit slime mould appearing to consume a living ant, and another of a conecap mushroom growing on deer droppings.

“I am enthralled by the bizarreness and the contrast between something like a cowpat - the last thing anyone wants to spend time around - and the incredible beauty and complexity of the fungi. Usually when you see these things in the wild, you’re just getting a snapshot of their lifecycle. The timelapses show it all,” he says.

Via webcam, Drummond-Herdman shows us his microscope station and the containers positioned around his bedroom, explaining that the boxes of dung do not smell because they were produced by herbivores and are mostly undigested plants. He hopes his videos inspire greater appreciation of nature conservation in the UK, particularly fungi.

“I am trying to shout about them in the right way. The whole point of this is not to name a random species that 10 people read about in a journal. I want to show that taxonomy is the frontline of biodiversity research. Researching habitat loss and native species is nothing without it,” he says.