Our annual third year field trip has a long history. We have an emeritus professor in the school who did his PhD in the area where the field trip started. It was all based on that, really! He must be close to 80 by now. The field trip still goes. And when I joined it really soon after starting work at Bangor University, I inherited all the teaching material from my predecessors.
For many years, the component I ended up teaching was taught by my colleague James. And back in the days, he had PhD student called Bill. And the teaching materials included line drawings of the most abundant species of foraminifera they would find in that estuary. I've been using them too.
Sometimes you find a species in your samples of which there is no line drawing. So far I had just ignored that. But now that we even have moved to another side of Wales, I figured it was important I adapt the set of drawings of it. There are some species we never find, and there are some species not in the drawings that we do find. So I set to work!
I was certain the old drawings were just done on paper. And in order to make my drawings look most like his, I should have done the same. But in the end they had to end up in a PDF, and I decided that efficiency was more important than staying close to the original style. I drew mine directly in Inkscape. I'm not very good with that package yet, but I figured my drawings were of sufficient quality to help in identification of the species portrayed.
I think it is the first time in decades that any drawings have been added to the original set! Bill has been a professor in St Andrews for years. It actually was quite some fun to do it! And it's not as if you can't tell the difference between the two styles, but I do think I made the difference subtle enough to not be jarring!
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| the old Elphidium williamsoni drawing by Bill top left, and my additional species |
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