North Island: WKR, vic. Forestry Headquarters, 21.vi.81, coll. RHP, no. 42483 (holotype, PDD; isotype, TENN).

Fruit bodies up to 30 x 1.5 mm, simple clubs, scattered to gregarious but not cespitose, narrowly fusiform to cylindrical, arising from small white mycelial patches. Club pale yellow at maturity, paler when young, subopaque, equal; apex rounded. Stipe concolourous to paler, subtranslucent, equal.
Tramal hyphae hardly inflated, clampless, tightly packed, parallel; secondary septa common. Subhymenium poorly developed. Hymenium hardly thickening, free; basidia 40-50 µm long, clavate, attenuate below, clamped; contents minutely multiguttulate at maturity; sterigmata 4, spindly, divergent.
Spores 5.8-7.9 x 4.0-5.0 µm (E= 1.29-1.58; E^m = 1.45; L^m = 6.75 µm), short cylindrical to ellipsoid, spiny at maturity, thin-walled; contents uniguttulate at maturity, the guttule highly refringent; hilar appendix small, not prominent; ornamentation of sharp, conical spines up to 2 µm long, sparsely scattered over spore surface.

On soil and humus.

Receptacula ad 30 x 1.5 mm, simplicia, gregaria, juniora cremea, vetustiora flavida. Hyphis efibulatis; basidiis fibulatis. Sporis echinulatis, ut in oratione infra.

Taxa in subgenus Holocoryne with ellipsoid spiny spores are few. One, Clavaria echino-olivacea, produces white fruit bodies and larger spores. The others, C. tuberculospora and C. californica, produce yellowish fruit bodies, but in the former, spores are different in shape (but see under that name for caveats), and those of C. californica are significantly larger. Moreover, the hymenium in C. tuberculospora is agglutinated in dried specimens, making the basidial clamp difficult to observe, whereas that of C. echino-brevispora is free and the clamps are easy to see in squash mounts.