IOUEA: A Creative Coup

In IOUEA: A Cretaceous Coup in the November 1003 Word Ways, Susan Thorpe reported her discovery of IOUEA, the name of a fossil sponge genus in The Encyclopedia of Paleontology (1979), written by Rhodes Fairbridge and David Jablonski. (This five-letter-all-vowel word also appears in Nomenclator Zoologicus.) I wrote recently to Dr. Michelle Kelly Shanks, a world authority on sponges, in Auckland, New Zealand after I read in a paper of hers of a living species of the genus IOUEA. I was also interested in how de Laubenfels came to name the genus back in 1955