I said in another post that I doubted the difference in the shape of the spores would be as clear cut as the article in the Spring 2008 issue of the Forayer implies.
The hairs in your two photos both look to me much more like the photomicrographs of the hairs of
Sarcoscypha coccinea. Yet a substantial proportion of the spores look blunt ended, which would imply
Sarcoscypha austriaca. You certainly couldn't say that the majority were round-ended, which is supposed to be the case in
S. coccinea. Then again, perhaps things would become clearer if you looked at a larger number of spores.
I remain to be convinced about how easy it is to separate these two species.
As to why the names have changed, that's a very good question and I'll give you my perspective.
Friends of mine who were looking at fungi in the 1960s and 1970s, long before I got started, say that life was much easier then. You just had "good old Lange and Hora,
Guide to Mushrooms and Toadstools" which had a paltry 600 species... and you just made your finds fit with one of the pictures in the book. Easy.
It all got a lot more complicated once Roger Phillips brought out his book and other literature and guides started to appear in English. (No criticism of Roger Phillips's excellent piece of work intended of course.)
In Lange and Hora there is only
Sarcoscypha coccinea, so naturally everything was labelled as that. Roll forward to 1981 and the revised edition of Dennis's
British Ascomycetes and we still have only the one species.
Fungi of Switzerland Volume 1 published in 1984 still only has the one species.
It wasn't until I bought Nordic Macromycetes Volume 1 (published in 2000) that I had some literature which actually acknowledged there were two species.
So once literature recognising the existence of two species became more widely available, this message gradually filtered through to British field mycologists and some keen people began to check the hairs... and it turned out that most of the finds had curly hairs so they were all now called
Sarcoscypha austriaca.
This doesn't reflect any real change in the distribution of the species. It is simply that the majority of specimens found in the UK turn out to have curly hairs.
There may have been changes over the years in the relative frequencies of the two species but there is no way of telling from the data because the majority of the records up to the end of the last century will not have been backed up with microscopic examination of the key characters that separate the two species.
There are other interesting tales along similar lines but this post has already gone on for far too long.
Ken