Siliceous and Delicious

Started the week with renewed enthusiasm, thanks to a restorative long weekend and those edifyingly clarifying meetings at the end of last week. What I need now is a list and filing system for the morphological information I’ll collect for each of the remaining taxa. This will probably be some combination of the original taxonomic publications defining the genera (from the Farlow library), web resources like AlgaeBase, and more recent publications (for better images) such as the DSDP/ODP reports. Since I’ll need to document where this information came from in any publications stemming from this work (one should never give up hope entirely), I’ll want to keep track of where this information came from.

Found two reasonably helpful references for Annellus; decided to make subfolders in Papers to store these, then copy citations to my Excel spreadsheet. Got frustrated again trying to find references for Baxteria/Baxteriopsis (still nothing good for that genus), then unexpectedly found that Google books has scanned van Heurck et al., 1896—hilariously enough, they scanned the copy from the Farlow library! This contained a vast number of descriptions, not too detailed and obviously lacking the benefit of SEM-scale views of the frustule, including of Baxteria and Brunia. I’ll be damned if I can make anything of the morphological descriptions, though—the writing style is very 19th-Century…

Squandered away the rest of the day giving Summer & co. a tour of the museum, reading the paper for the new (and, for once, exciting) department mini-journal-club, and attending the meeting for said group.