Charles Atwood Kofoid (1865-1947), was born on a farm near Granville, Illinois, five years after his father, a cabinetmaker, sailed for America from Denmark. Charles entered Oberlin College when he was 2 and worked his way by “waiting tables and sawing wood’, according to his biographers. who know little of his early years except that his family’s “Puritan backround rermained rather conspicous” and that “he had not had an easy time before he was able to begin his college education’.
Kofoid grew up to become a zoologist known (amongst zoologists) for collecting and classifying many new species of marine protozoans. He helped systemise and established marine biology as we (or at least marine biologists) know it today.
What you’re looking at are Kofoid’s 12 illustrations of dinoflagellate. from his book, The free-living unarmored dinoflagellata (1921). A specific type of dinoflagellate – unarmoured dinoflagellate. A type of plankton. A water algae.
Apparently, these “dinoflagellates are single-celled eukaryotes constituting the phylum Dinoflagellata. Usually considered algae, dinoflagellates are mostly marine plankton, but they also are common in freshwater habitats. Their populations are distributed depending on sea surface temperature, salinity, or depth.”
But who cares? They’re sooooo pretty, right?
