Siliceous and Delicious

Lost a bit of time this morning catching up on correspondence—but it needed to be done. Then on to the morphospace: finished off the rest of the “difficult” taxa to be added in the Cretaceous. I found out that Pyxidicula was a synonym of Stephanopyxis, making life easier. And Epithelion, Longinata, and Tubularia just didn’t have images or descriptions anywhere that were good enough to make a valid entry in the matrix. I gave them the axe. It’s too bad, because the two latter ones are  “intermediate” sternum-less but pennate-like genera that Sims et al. specifically mention in their paper about diatom evolution. But there are no images, and no descriptions, so it’s all to no avail. God knows how Sims et al. know those two taxa don’t have sterna—it sure isn’t from the shitty-shitty images published in the Hajos paper (DSDP site 275), and they also don’t offer a reference in their 2006 paper. So, without further tears, it’s time to move ever forward.

The next job is to tidy up the matrix. Yech. There’s some messiness introduced with character #61, the one dealing with ‘robust linking processes’.