Let the giants be named - Taxonomic description database for the isopod genus Bathynomus for the DELTA system

Morphological characters have been extracted from recent relevant literature on Bathynomus, mainly from the six previously known species from the Atlantic Ocean and gulf of Mexico (Magalhães and Young 2003; Lowry and Dempsey 2006; Shipley et al. 2016; Huang et al. 2022). To simultaneously maximize compactness and taxonomic value of the species description, mainly characters that have previously been interpreted as diagnostic at the species level have been included, omitting others which played no role in species delimitation. A taxonomic database has been newly set up using DELTA (Dallwitz 1980, 1993; Dallwitz et al. 2006). Character states for all presently known Atlantic congeners have been scored to generate a natural language description and a new identification key (Dallwitz 1974) for the region as well as a species diagnosis. The species diagnosis has been composed based on the characters used in the identification key.