I heard yesterday from Martin Kalfatovic (BHL) that David Remsen has died. Very sad news.

As part of the discussion on whether legacy biodiversity literature matters a graph from the following paper came up: So, why is the Sarkar et al. graph bogus? Here is their graph (Fig. 3) for animals: This is the number of new animal species described each year, estimated by parsing taxonomic names and extracting the date in the taxonomic authority. There are two prominent "spikes" which are worrying.

The BBC web site has an article entitled Giant deep sea jellyfish filmed in Gulf of Mexico which has footage of Stygiomedusa gigantea , and mentions an associated fish, Thalassobathia pelagica . One thing that frustrates me beyond belief is how hard it is to get more information about these organisms. Put another way, the biodiversity informatics community is missing a huge opportunity here.