1. The first, introductory part is a one-minute sequence showing a simulation of Foraminifera – single-celled eukaryotes that occupy marine benthic and pelagic zones from polar to tropic areas. These organisms have an extraordinary fossil record since Cambrian (about 540 million years ago), which makes them an ideal model organism and a microfossil often used for paleoreconstructions and testin...

As living organisms, planktonic foraminifera are not passive tracers of the environment. Their test geochemistry—arguably the single most important resource for paleoceanographic research—reflects the combined signal of environmental, biological, and preservational processes. For most species, comparisons of test stable isotopic composition within and among taxa provide the primary means for di...

The use of planktonic foraminifera in paleoceanography requires taxonomic consistency and precise assessment of the species biogeography. Yet, ribosomal small subunit (SSUr) DNA analyses have revealed that most of the modern morpho-species of planktonic foraminifera are composed of a complex of several distinct genetic types that may correspond to cryptic or pseudo-cryptic species. These geneti...

the qom formation, a series of shales, sandstones and carbonate deposits, is the last transgression of the sea in central iran sedimentary basin. foraminifera are one of the most important and numerous fossil groups present in the qom formation. in this study, the micropaleontology of the qom formation in three measured stratigraphic sections in south and west of tafresh (rakin, band-e-ali nagh...

The paper entitled “Variation in stable carbon and oxygen isotopes of individual benthic foraminifera: tracers for quantifying the vital effect” by Ishimura San et al. deals with the applicability of inter-individual delta13C and delta18O distributions (Standard Deviation within species) to reconstruct the bottom water isotopic signatures. This work is based on live and dead (assumed as modern)...

To document the evolution of the early cryosphere, stable isotope analyses were conducted on the planktonic and benthic foraminifers from Ocean Drilling Program Site 1218. We generated two parallel 54m-long records at 10-cm resolution and thus produced a standard Pacific stable isotope reference curve for the 26.4to 30.0-Ma interval within the Oligocene. These data are necessary to document the...

The Gurpi Formation, one of the geologycal units of the Zagros Basin, stretches with in the Folded Zagros in the provinces of Khuzestan, Lorestan, and Fars,in southwest Iran. In all 525 samples were collected from five stratigraphic sectiones of the Gurpi Formation in Dezful embayment Zone for studying biostratigraphy. Totally 47 species from 23 Planktonic foraminifera genera were recognized in...

A thorough review of literature showed that very little work has been carried out on foraminifera from the Muthupet Lagoon. The most notable research in this aspect has been the recent findings by Rajeshwara Rao et al. (2013), who provided an insight into the ecology of one particular species, Asterorotalia trispinosa (Thalmann, 1933). Infaunal habitat preferences of benthic foraminifera, howev...

The high sequence divergence within the small subunit ribosomal RNA gene (SSU rDNA) of foraminifera makes it difficult to establish the homology of individual nucleotides across taxa. Alignment-based approaches so far relied on time-consuming manual alignments and discarded up to 50% of the sequenced nucleotides prior to phylogenetic inference. Here, we investigate the potential of the multiple...