Featured on PDR in the collection Adolf Schmidt’s Atlas der Diatomaceenkunde (1890)

“Diatoms are algae that live in houses made of glass”, write the editors of the North American diatom society. Unicellular organisms that sometimes form colonies, these plankton have a siliceous skeleton known as a frustule, and thrive everywhere, in any type of water: saline, brackish, or fresh. The scale of diatoms varies widely, as does their geometry. Some are about three micrometers in diameter, others are almost visible to the unassisted eye. Some are circular with spines resembling “Martian antennae”, writes Mary Ann Tiffany and Stephen S. Nagy in a book chapter about “The Beauty of Diatoms”, others sport “a fringe-like skirt”. Accordingly, researchers seem to always have a favorite specimen, from an aesthetic point of view, and nineteenth-century enthusiasts went so far as to…