A FIRST COMPREHENSIVE EVALUATED LIST OF CENOZOIC RADIOLARIAN SPECIES NAMES

Despite their extensive use in biostratigraphy and paleoceanography, no reasonably complete catalogs or even check lists exist for Cenozoic radiolarian species names, although there are several partial catalogs/databases in development. We present here a first step towards creating such a catalog in the form of a list of all species names, with family membership, author, year, and most importantly taxonomic status (with link, if synonym, to the valid name), for all polycystine species names published by the DSDP or ODP phases of the deep-sea drilling program (plus a few from IODP), or cataloged online by the community www.radiolaria.org website (Dolven). Information for each species is supplemented by additional data drawn from two unpublished taxonomic databases: Radworld (Caulet, Nigrini, Sanfilippo) and an unnamed database compiled by Suzuki. Our primary goal has been name equivalence, not formal revision, with emphasis on objective synonyms, though some subjective synonyms are given as well. Given the highly unclear nomenclatural state of Cenozoic taxonomy, no attempt has been made to determine the 'true' correct generic or species name for most species, leaving this work to future revisions, based on newly available re-illustrations of older type collections, e.g. Tanimura et al. (2009). Nor have we attempted to capture other Cenozoic names found only in the non-deep-sea drilling external literature. Nonetheless we feel this list represents the large majority of valid Cenozoic radiolarian species. Currently there are ca 1,200 valid names, plus more than 700 synonyms (including many published misspellings).

Most valid species or subspecies are Nassellaria (nearly 900), while there are fewer than 400 valid taxa in Spumellaria. Four families (Theoperidae, Actinommidae, Trissocyclidae and Plagiacanthidae) contain the majority of all valid names. There are 29 genera with >10 valid species or subspecies. Eucyrtidiumhas the most, with 34 species/subspecies.

The list is currently maintained by Lazarus in Berlin, and is integrated into the NSB microfossil occurrences database (www.nsb-mfn-berlin.de, for access please contact senior author). A formal publication is in preparation. Compilation of this list was in part supported with funding from the IODP.