All figured holotypes and paratypes are deposited in the National type collection of invertebrate and plant fossils, Geological Survey of Canada, 601 Booth Street, Ottawa ON, Canada K1A 0E8.

Holotype: Specimen GSC127649 in Geological Survey of Canada collections, Ottawa. Figure 8.1-8.5.

Paratypes: GSC127650 to 127657 in Geological Survey of Canada collections.

Type locality: Sponge reefs in Queen Charlotte Sound and Hecate Strait, continental shelf off British Columbia (west coast of Canada). The holotype was collected at: lat. 51° 20.792'N, long. 128° 51.085'W. Station TUL99A015, Shipek grab sample, water depth 229 m, southern Queen Charlotte Sound.

Type level and range: Modern seafloor.

Description: Test attached to dead siliceous sponge meshwork. Generally linear uniserial, though may form a pileup of chambers. Never biserial and never branching. Grows straight along sponge rods, but may change direction at any intersection of the meshwork. Test diameter is 60 to 120 µm, usually about 80 µm. Chambers vary from cylindrical to slightly inflated, as long as wide but with some variation. Sutures vary from nearly indistinct to clearly depressed. Initial part winds (rarely more than one whorl) around a sponge spicule or an intersection in the meshwork; may be slightly irregular or entangled. Proloculus and early chambers generally smaller (around 40 µm) than later chambers but increasing quickly in size; chamber diameter thereafter remaining approximately constant. Aperture at the tip of the last chamber, more or less flattened oval in shape. It may be located at the base of the apertural face, against the substrate or up in the apertural face. It is bordered by a thin lip of agglutinated material. Wall coarsely arenaceous relative to the diameter of the test, contributing into making the sutures indistinct. In most parts of the test except near the aperture, P. spongiphila is not floored, and the lumen lies against the substrate. It is "attached" in the sense of Hofker (1972, quoted by Gooday and Haynes 1983).

Dimensions: Holotype ca. 1 mm in length. Diameter of tube: 100-120 µm in adult part. Earliest chambers: ca. 40 µm. We do not have complete specimens of more than 1 mm. Longer specimens exist but segments are broken off or are concealed in dried mud.

Remarks: Modern species of Placopsilina are Placopsilina bradyi Cushman and McCulloch (1939), Placopsilina confusa Cushman (1920), Placopsilina kingsleyi Siddall (1886), and Placopsilina vesicularis Brady (1879). Only the first two are close to P. spongiphila. Placopsilina confusa differs from P. spongiphila by having more distinct chambers (depressed sutures) and a much more irregular and entangled growth. The closest modern species is P. bradyi. It differs from the present species by its larger diameter, chambers that are much shorter than broad, more inflated or else as broad as wide but then more or less hemispherical. The sutures are well-marked and deeply depressed whereas in many specimens of P. spongiphila, they are nearly invisible. Placopsilina bradyi often has a spiral initial part, or else no spiral part at all; it has no tangled early part nor does it start by wrapping itself around a prominence of the substratum—such as a sponge spicule. Cushman and McCulloch (1939) also report "a very few specimens attached to echinoid spines or to sponge spicules, one of which is figured. These are very slender perhaps due to the small amount of surface and may represent another species." The illustrated specimen of their figure 15 might have been P. spongiphila, but this single picture is not enough to judge.

The Jurassic sponge dweller Subbdelloidina haeusleri is larger than P. spongiphila (twice the diameter or more), has more inflated chambers and more depressed sutures. More characteristically, it may branch whereas P. spongiphila never does. Its growth is more irregular, and it more often tends to grow biserially, make tangles or pileups of chambers. The early part of S. haeusleri is typically entangled ("knäuelig" of German authors), but it does not wind around meshwork intersections in the way P. spongiphila does. In S. haeusleri, the whole test may be strongly contorted (Figure 14.15), in part because of the geometry of the sponges in which the specimens grew. This has no taxonomic value. The aperture is often not mentioned. Seibold and Seibold (1960a) mention a single round aperture. The aperture of the specimen of our Figure 14.16 is more probably a broken end of chamber; that of Figure 14.17 is slit-like. The multiple apertures reported by Frentzen (1944) have been shown later to be only artifacts of the etching process (Seibold and Seibold 1960a; Oesterle 1968).

Many species that have been referred to Placopsilina in the literature do not show one fundamental characteristic of the genus, which is having an initial spiral part. Others exhibit branching although the generic description does not mention it. A review of Placopsilina and of Subbdelloidina would be needed to find out the importance of these features.

Types and Occurrence: The nine types come from sponge reefs on the floor of Queen Charlotte Sound and Hecate Strait, off British Columbia, Canada. All specimens were growing attached to the dead meshwork of reef sponges. We counted 341 specimens, most of which consist of fragments.

Holotype: Specimen GSC127658 in Geological Survey of Canada collections, Ottawa. Figure 11.13-11.15.

Paratypes: GSC127659 to GSC127675 in Geological Survey of Canada collections.

Type locality: Sponge reefs in Queen Charlotte Sound and Hecate Strait, continental shelf off British Columbia (west coast of Canada). The holotype was collected at: lat. 53° 10.807'N, long. 130° 24.218'W. Station TUL99A09, piston core sample, depth in core: 167-170 cm, water depth 194 m, Hecate Strait.

Type level and range: Holocene deposits and modern seafloor.

Description: Test unilocular, with no definite shape, stretching in the space within the sponge meshwork and embracing it in such a way as to be attached. Engulfs silica rods by wrapping them completely and tightly with its wall so that the content of the lumen is completely insulated from the meshwork ("pseudoattached" according to the terminology of Hofker 1972). Shape of larger specimens depends on shape of meshwork cells in which they grow; that of smaller specimens not constrained by meshwork tends to be oval or even spherical. Wall calcareous, optically radial, pores visible only at high magnification (X15,000) on a slightly etched surface. Wall may be covered with conical spines that may be abundant or rare, low and blunt or high and sharp, and in some cases grow triple bifurcations at their tip. Suggestion but no clear evidence of a central canal inside the spines. The part of the wall that wraps around sponge spicules is not spinose; its junction with the rest of the wall is angular and bears barbs or overgrowths (frills) that further embrace the sponge spicules (Figure 11.3, 11.7-11.8, Figure 12.1, 12.4). These may be the result of a healing process. Single aperture at the open end of a delicate siphon which may be spinose. Siphon never connects two successive chambers even though one specimen may grow over and engulf the siphon of another specimen. Therefore, the species may be considered unilocular.

Dimensions: Specimens are commonly 400 µm or more in their greatest dimension, with some up to 1100 µm.

Remarks: In many Ramulina species, both Mesozoic and Cenozoic, the chambers look like gradual enlargements of a tube. In other species, the tube is sharply distinct from the chamber but often there are many tubes emerging from each chamber. When preservation is good, Ramulina specimens are commonly multi-chambered. Of the six modern Ramulina species illustrated by Loeblich and Tappan (1994) from the Sahul Shelf, two show some resemblance to R. siphonifera: Ramulina vanandeli and Ramulina confossa, both described as new. Ramulina siphonifera resembles R. vanandeli by being attached to the substrate, but the latter is plurilocular, the connection between chambers is gradational and the wall is more coarsely porous. Ramulina confossa resembles our species in being unilocular, but its wall is much more porous and the aperture is not on a siphon.

The Ramulina species reported from the Upper Jurassic, Ramulina spandeli Paalzow (1917), Ramulina fusiformis Khan (1950) and Ramulina nodosarioides Dayn (1958) are all quite different from R. siphonifera. On the other hand, there is a definite resemblance between Bullopora tuberculata and our material in the way both grow through the sponge meshwork, in the coarse prismatic nature of the wall (Figure 12.19) and in the spines. We have not been able to make a section through a spine to compare it with B. tuberculata's characteristic canaliferous spines. If there is a central canal in the spines of our specimens, it must be no more than 1 µm in diameter, compared with ca. 4 µm for the Jurassic species. The latter tends to have larger (~double) overall dimensions than R. siphonifera, which may be reflected in the pore canal size. Bullopora tuberculata is plurilocular (Figure 14.2-14.3); there are few published pictures clearly showing the foramen.

Types and Occurrence: The types (18 individually figured specimens plus three sponge fragments with many uncounted specimens attached to them) come from sponge reefs on the floor of Queen Charlotte Sound, Hecate Strait and Strait of Georgia, off British Columbia, Canada. Many specimens were attached to the dead meshwork of reef sponges while some had obviously been torn off their substrate; only two specimens in one sample were growing attached to a sand grain. We counted 312 fairly complete specimens, many of which were damaged either for having been torn off the meshwork or because of dissolution. There are also many uncounted specimens in the material.