My plans were to be updating this every day but it has been hard to find the time as there have been so many things to do. My first article was finished the night before last, at least to the point where I could send it to my two colleagues (one here at U-Nebraska, the other in Poland) for their input. Getting there required chasing down many references, tackling taxonomic issues, reading, writing, six plates, a figure, a table and hundreds of little details. The article is likely still more than a month from being submitted. There is still the portions to be done by my colleagues, plus the abstract and discussion still to be written, the addition of probably 2 plate of canning electron microscope (SEM) pictures and integrating those into the article, plus yet another hundred details. Then that must be sent to a couple of pre-reviewers for their comments prior to submittal to the journal.
In the meantime, I am starting work on paper-2. This will detail the “crazy assemblage” of really weird silicoflagellates that we have found lower in the Cretaceous. I must search many more slides with sparse specimens to see what else I can find there, put do some more photography of the productive interval that we discovered earlier. The first slide yesterday morning was at the bottom of one of my geologic sections – maybe the oldest material in my study – and I was immediately surprised to find what may perhaps be yet another new species! But specimens are pretty rare – I found 7 on the slide, 2 being of the potential new species – so I will have to look through more slides of that sample.
I spent the rest of the day viewing the next four slides in that section, finding three more specimens – nothing unusual. This also a part of science. You get the WOW-moments, of which I have had many during this sabbatical, but there is also the slogging through less productive intervals, simply documents that there is indeed very little there. The data is hard to come by, ten specimesn altogether in five slides yesterday. But that too is valuable. And the one productive slide, even though it had only seven specimens, provides what may turn out to be a key piece of knowledge about the early evolution of silicoflagellates.
I will try to get back on track with this blog and get some more pictures up in the next couple of days.
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