Evidence for the existence of life during the Archaean segment of Earth history (more than 2500 Myr ago) is summarized. Data are presented for 48 Archaean deposits reported to contain biogenic stromatolites, for 14 such units reported to contain 40 morphotypes of putative microfossils, and for 13 especially ancient, 3200-3500 Myr old geologic units for which available organic geochemical data a...

5055 TESTING THE SURVIVAL OF MICROFOSSILS DURING ENTRY INTO THE EARTH’S ATMOSPHERE: THE STONE 6 EXPERIMENT F. Foucher1, F. Westall1, F. Brandstätter2, R. Demets3, J. Parnell4, C. Cockell5, H. Edwards6, G. Kurat2, A. Brack1. 1Centre de Biophysique Moléculaire, CNRS, Orléans, France, E-mail: [email protected], 2Natural History Museum, Vienna, Austria, 3ESA-ESTEC, Nordwijk, The Neth...

Abstract— The complete sections of the Lower and Upper Vendian East European Platform were opened in boreholes Belarus. This allows us to consider this region as a stratotype area. In order update paleontological characteristics Vendian, organic-walled microfossils from Bogushevsk-1, Bogushevsk-2 (Liozno), Lepel-1 reference drilled north Orsha Depression studied. transitive assemblage I with Le...

Although chrysophyte stomatocysts have a fossil record that likely extends to the lower Cretaceous, to date neither scales nor bristles of the scaled chrysophyte genera older than Holocene have been reported. This leaves the origin of this important group of freshwater algae a mystery. We discovered abundant and diverse scaled chrysophyte microfossils in ca. 47 Ma sediments (Middle Eocene, Lute...

Burgess Shale-type deposits are renowned for their exquisite preservation of soft-bodied organisms, representing a range of animal body plans that evolved during the Cambrian 'explosion'. However, the rarity of these fossil deposits makes it difficult to reconstruct the broader-scale distributions of their constituent organisms. By contrast, microscopic skeletal elements represent an extensive ...

—Well-preserved microfossils occur in abundance through more than 1000m of lower Mesoproterozoic siliciclastic rocks composing the Roper Group, Northern Territory, Australia. The Roper assemblage includes 34 taxa, five interpreted unambiguously as eukaryotes, nine as possible eukaryotes (including Blastanosphaira kokkoda new genus and new species, a budding spheromorph with thin chagrinate wall...

Glacial sea surface temperatures (SSTs) simulated by an atmosphere-mixed layer ocean model are compared with those reconstructed by the Climate: Long-Range Investigation, Mapping, and Prediction (CLIMAP) Project using planktonic microfossils. Two methods of comparison are employed. The first is global and uses the subjectively analyzed (i.e., hand contoured, then digitized) data set published b...

6.15.8 PALEOTEMPERATURE STUDIES USING THE ALKENONE METHOD 413 6.15.8.1 Holocene High-resolution Studies 414 6.15.8.2 Millennial-scale Events of the Late Pleistocene and Last Glacial Termination 415 6.15.8.3 Marine Temperatures during the LGM 417 6.15.8.4 SST Records of the Late Pleistocene Ice Age Cycles 420 6.15.8.5 SST before the Late Pleistocene 421 6.15.8.6 Comparison with other Proxies: dO...

In the last years, the Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (AABC) has published several interesting papers on paleontology, varying from Quaternary microfossils (Utida et al. 2012), Argentinean woods from Santa Cruz (Vera and Césari 2012), Cretaceous lizards (Simões 2012), and turtle eggs from China (Wang et al. 2013), just to mention a few. On the same lines, the present issue of the A...