  A result of Mason, as refined by Ingleton, characterizes transversal matroids
as the matroids that satisfy a set of inequalities that relate the ranks of
intersections and unions of nonempty sets of cyclic flats. We prove
counterparts, for fundamental transversal matroids, of this and other
characterizations of transversal matroids. In particular, we show that
fundamental transversal matroids are precisely the matroids that yield equality
in Mason's inequalities and we deduce a characterization of fundamental
transversal matroids due to Brylawski from this simpler characterization.
