Abstracted/indexed

Foraminifera are marine microorganisms with a calcium carbonate shell. Their fossil remains build up on the seafloor, forming kilometres of sediment over time. From analysis of the foraminiferal record we can estimate past climate conditions and the geological history of the Earth. We have developed an artificial intelligence system for automatically identifying foraminifera species, replacing the time-consuming manual approach and thus helping to make these analyses more efficient and accurate.

We compared three methods of breaking apart well-cemented carbonate rocks in order to obtain liberated fossiliferous material. The first two methods are traditional and the third is novel to this field. The novel technique (fragmentation using electric pulses, SELFRAG) proved to be the most efficient and effective at liberating microfossil material from surrounding rock. We suggest best practice for using this technique and further materials in which it could prove successful in future.

This paper describes a new species of the genus Desmocysta from the Late Cretaceous in the Norwegian Sea. The short stratigraphic range for this new species makes it a good biostratigraphic marker. The available published data also indicate that this genus is restricted to higher latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere and is suggested to have preferred turbid waters and stressed marine environments.

We described two new species of the fossil dinoflagellate cyst genus Svalbardella. S. clausii sp. nov. has a narrow range in the lowermost Chattian and may be related to cooler surface waters. S. kareniae sp. nov. ranges from Lower Oligocene to Lower Miocene and favours more open marine conditions. Our study illustrates the close phylogenetic relationship between Svalbardella and Palaeocystodinium and shows that surface ornamentation and the tabulation are variable features within both genera.

We identify the first continuous carbonate-bearing sediment record from the tropical ocean that spans the entirety of the global warming event, the Middle Eocene Climatic Optimum, ca. 40 Ma. We determine significant mismatches between middle Eocene calcareous microfossil datums from the tropical Pacific Ocean and established low-latitude zonation schemes. We highlight the potential of ODP Site 865 for future investigations into environmental and biotic changes throughout the early Paleogene.