Paleontica Community

Dear microfossil hunting colleagues,

in a sq-inch on the seafloor and the water column above dozens or thousands of microorganisms usually live and lived. In fossil rocks and samples microfossils - if present - do not come alone but as an assemblage of different species and many specimens. These assemblages represent the environment in which the specimens lived. Besides of the micro-organisms living on the sea-ground there maybe many planktonic ones living in the water column above. When they die, their shell/remnants sink to the seafloor and intermingle with the remnants of those, who lived on the bottom.

Please find in the image an example of my work on Foraminifera from a Miocene sample from Quelfes, Portugal. It is just a start as many more species can be found in this material. Nonetheless is already tells the story of a nearshore Miocene and nutrient rich environment. I strongly recommend you to work on your samples likewise.

WORK ON THE ASSEMBLAGE ! It is the true fossil record. Picking just the big, nice looking specimens is a man-made fabricate, which gives a misleading idea about, what is really there. Respect nature as it is and appears.

Get a microcell with 10 or more holes and put the assemblage sorted by morphology in it. Then you have a true picture of the assemblage, environment, and geological time of the material.

Have fun with your assemblages !

Foram-Mike


[Edited by Foram-Michael on 10-03-2017 at 13:38 GMT +1]

[Edited by Foram-Michael on 10-03-2017 at 13:39 GMT +1]

Hi Michael,

Good to see you on fossiel.net! We haven't had contact in a while, but I'm still busy on forams.

At the moment I'm working on a sample from the Dutch/Belgian Maastrichtian, from which I took an representative subsample in order to get an assemblage of species. As soon as I have a complete result, I'll share it with you.

On working with assemblages: don't forget to mention that not only the occurring species tell something about the environment etc, but also the numbers in which these species occur. And the relative abundance of hyaline, porcelaneous and aggluginated genera. 'Ecology and Applications of Benthic Foraminifera' by J.W. Murray (2006) gives a lot of info on this topic.

Bye,
Koen Jellema

[Bewerkt door KoenJ op 10-03-2017 om 16:40 NL]