Siliceous and Delicious

Morphospace coding continues. I didn’t start until 10—emails, setting up more FIB time, grabbing coffee with Ben Gill, updating my to-do list, calling technology services to find out about Kate’s new computer, and somehow an hour and a half has whizzed by. Found a genus description of the first taxon, Crucidenticula, pretty quickly, but struggled a bit to understand the text description. Shortly after describing Cussia and digging a reference for Cymatodiscus out of the bowels of the MCZ library, I was whisked away on a long lunch break to pick up Kati’s new laptop and drop her off at work.

Back to work at 2pm. Knocked out the Cymatodiscus description in time for cookie hour. Cymatogonia proved more difficult; that search ended with a reference to be looked up in the Farlow library. Irritatingly, Cymatotheca called for a description from a paper I had just dug up from the MCZ library, but I had only scanned the pages relevant to the species I had been looking at… Anyway, once I made the second visit to the library, I had something to work with, though the descriptions from this source (Hanna, 1932) are anything but easily comprehensible.

Dicladia turned out to be a royal pain in the ass because Andrews (1980, Micropaleontology) claims that it’s the resting spore of aChaetoceros species. Well, is it? How am I supposed to find this out? Well, a search threw up another paper by Suto (2005, Phycologia), so I’m taking this as gospel for now. Dicladia is the fossil of a resting stage, not an active vegetative cell, and thus will not be considered in the morphospace. Boom, slam. Moving on.