On the composition of oceanic and littoral manganese nodules (published online 2015)

The following analyses were made some years ago, principally with the object of ascertaining the state of oxidation of the manganese in the nodules. The nodules examined came from three different localities, two of them oceanic and the third littoral. Samples marked I., II., and III. are from nodules brought up in the trawl on board the "Challenger," on 13th March 1874, in lat. 42° 42' S., long. 134° 10' E. The depth of the water was 2600 fathoms, and the temperature of the bottom water 0·2° C. The density of the bottom water was 1·02570 at 15·56° C. Being from a high southern latitude, and therefore near the source of surface aeration, the water is highly charged with atmospheric gases, especially oxygen. It contained, per litre, 18·4 c.c. of mixed nitrogen and oxygen, of which 31·81 per cent, was oxygen, and 27·33 c.c, or 53·7 milligrammes, loosely-bound carbonic acid. The position of the station is about 400 miles south-west of the nearest part of the Australian coast, and about 500 miles west of Tasmania. It was the deepest water observed in the Antarctic voyage between the Cape of Good Hope and Melbourne. The haul was a very abundant one, and a few notes which I made at the time may be interesting: -"The water was found unexpectedly deep, the bottom being red clay, with some Foraminifera.

Appendix 1: List of cladistic characters published on ammonites

The file here provided, is the list of all characters that have been used in cladistic analysis on ammonoids published so far. It constitutes the base of a study which investigates practices in characters establishment. Find here after the abstract of the article that is associated to this file. Cladistics appears as one of the most useful method to reconstruct phylogeny of fossil taxa. However, ammonoids workers tend to sulk this method. The capital step of cladistic analysis is the recognition of homology hypothesis as clue to reconstruct monophyletic clades based on the sharing of derived traits. Previous authors have suggested that coding schemes are usually direct transcription of original taxa description. However, establishing a list of characters (i.e. a matrix taxa /characters) is a very different work compared to a compilation of diagnoses. How morphology is coded in ammonoids? How coding schemes are influenced by traditional descriptions / characters? Here, we review all cladistic analyses of ammonoids published in the literature to compare characters and the way authors have dealt with the treatment of continuous characters, polymorphism and ontogeny. Several barriers are usually invoked to justify that cladistics cannot be applied to reconstruct ammonoids phylogenies. We show that an appropriate use of improvements both on ammonoids' knowledge and cladistics methodology may overcome limitations usually invoked to perform cladistic analysis on ammonoids.