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what is this?
Hello everybody
I have found this micro remains in soil samples from Panamá. Initially I thought they were pollen, because they have a very strong wall and decorations (like fingerprints), but they also have extintion cross.
thankyou for your insights
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Hi Veronica,
Those are concentricystes and they are a somewhat mysterious microfossil. They exhibit low order birefringence with an extinction cross under XPL. They can turn up in standard pollen and phytolith preps and are most often associated with warm and humid conditions in paleo/geological records. Some (myself included) suspect that they are spores from a freshwater algae, but no one has ever associated them with a living organism, hence the mystery. I have occasionally recovered them from tropical and subtropical soils from the Americas, Africa, and the Pacific Islands, and even had them appear briefly in a wetland sediment core from the high desert of southern New Mexico (USA) during the Bølling–Allerød interstadial. It's been a few years since I last did a literature search on them, and perhaps more is known about them now, but here's a link to an open-access paper with some nice images: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11434-013-5747-9.
All the best,
Chad Yost
thank you Chad!
