LATENTIFISTULIDAE Nazarov & Ormiston, 1983

Noble, Paula, Aitchison, Jonathan C., Danelian, Taniel, Dumitrica, Paulian, Maletz, Jörg, Suzuki, Noritoshi, Cuvelier, Jessie, Caridroit, Martial & O’Dogherty, Luis, 2017, Taxonomy of Paleozoic radiolarian genera, Geodiversitas 39 (3), pp. 419-502 : 461

Family LATENTIFISTULIDAE Nazarov & Ormiston, 1983

Ouakidae Cheng, 1986: 175 .

Archaeopyramisidae Cheng, 1986: 179 .

REMARKS

As defined by De Wever et al. (2001: 101) these taxa are “ Latentifistularia with an initial spicule with one apical and two or three basal spines, and a perforate to slightly perforate microsphere”. Housed in this family are 3 to 4 rayed lobate forms, excluding the triangular forms placed in the Ruzhencevispongidae . Following De Wever in part, we include Latentifistula , Areolicaudatus and Brianellium , but we reassign Archaeopyramisa , and Wonia to other families. We also include other the lobate or radiate forms Latentibifistula , Staurentactinia .

Cheng (1986) erected the superfamily Archaeopyramisidae to house his stauraxon radiolarian taxa from the Ouchita and Arbuckle mountains. He found that these taxa possessed a “labyrinthine” structure, which consists of a loose spongy meshwork composed of “hollow bars intricately interlacing to form an irregular pore frame” Superficially, these taxa appear to have what Cenozoic workers would term a loose spongy wall structure, however, the big distinction is the hollow nature of the bars. In the Lower Paleozoic a different use of the term labyrinthine is adopted to describe a similar mesh construction but lacking the hollow bars; (e.g. MacDonald 1998; Won et al. 2002; Jones & Noble 2006; Maletz & Bruton 2007). Cheng is the only researcher to have reported hollow bars in the upper Paleozoic stauraxon taxa, and thus we are inclined to expect that this detailed structure is either a preservational artifact, or a feature rarely preserved in other spongy taxa. We do not treat the hollow nature of the bars as a criterion that merits erecting a new superfamily. We follow De Wever et al. (2001) in treating the Ouakidae and Archaeopyramisidae as a junior synonyms to Latentifistulidae .