Diatom of the Month - January: South American diatoms: a hidden gem with enormous potential
by Xavier Benito-Granell * The South American continent was crucial to inspire Charles Darwin´s Origin of Species . During his travel, Darwin recognized the importance of two factors while developing his famous theory on how nature works: biogeography and history. In Darwin’s words: “ When on board H.M.S. Beagle, as naturalist, I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants in South America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent ”. Professor Christian Ehrenberg was the first to analyze diatoms from South America, in the Tierra del Fuego . Darwin was fascinated by Ehrenberg´s microscopic observations of diatoms in diatom-rich geological deposits ( diatomite ). Due to the old age of such deposits and known diatom forms identified, Darwin thought that diatom distributions should also be old, and probably having wide geographical distributions due to their presence in that extreme region of Earth....