Adrian sends sand

 
in the mail these days was a little box from Adrian, UK - a long time contributor to the Foraminifera.eu project.

The box contains a couple of small bags with sand. A closer look through the binocular reveals that these sands mainly consist of shells, tests and fragments of bigger organism-remnants. These sands are rich in foraminifera. My estimate is that there are hundreds if not thousands of forams in each tiny bag.

The forams lived once in Scotland, Tenerife,  Malta, Crete  and Bermuda.

It gives us a lot to find und to have fun.

Great job Adrian ! 

Operculina ammonoides

Operculina ammonoides (Gronovius, 1781) - what a nice species we came across in a sample from a beach near Warrnambool, Victoria, Australia.

Find more information at Plummercell Warrnambool Field 25

Plummercell Slide of Greenland Shelf objects

A new plummercell slide of foraminifera and other objects from the Greenland shelf is online. It has been provided by scientists who made a cruise in the Greeland Sea on R.V. Poseidon in 1995. The material was collected with an epibenthic sledge from the bottom of the Greenland Sea at 192m water-depth. The material was sorted and the single objects glued on the 36 fields of the plummercell slide by Karl-Otto Bock.

Find the plummercell slide with clickable single fields and classified foraminifera at Plummercell slide Greenland Shelf
Michael

How to get and collect foraminifera ?

It is not difficult to get foraminifera. Pick them at the beach or extract them from sedimentary rock.

Online is now a detailed description how to do it, from sampling in the field, extraction, picking, identifying to building a collection. So far it is only available in German :)

Go to www.foraminifera.eu/probenauf.html

Tell us about your experience.

Fossil Foraminifera from the South Yellow Sea

Gallitellia

Feifei Wang from the Qingdao Institute of Marine Geology in Qingdao, China has contributed 77 images of foraminifera. They lived on the seafloor of the South Yellow Sea in the Late Quaternary.

See all the images at www.foraminifera.eu/sys.php

Field trip to the chalk-quarry Laegerdorf

In July our small group of hobby-micropaleontologists heads to the chalk-quarry Laegerdorf near Hamburg: doors are open, it its collectors Sunday. While our macropaleontological colleagues are already busy with their heavy equipment and first findings of belemnites are reported we discuss the stratigrafical setting:





















We soon skip our plan to match stratigrafical maps in the literature with sampling in the quarry. We do a chronological sampling and hope, that the micropaleontological content will tell us more.










After 7 hours of continous sampling we have 15 bags of 500g. Mircofossils are not observable, with a magnifying glas: 0,00.
What have you got ? is the question of our colleagues with the buckets full of belemnits, starfish, sponges ...
Yeah , oh my god - us ? - we don't know ...

Our field trip starts back home. After cleaning, washing, sieving of 1/3 of the first bag a residue with fraction > 63µm is left:




















In three such spoons we find hundreds of foraminifera and other microfossil specimens. Cleaning needs to be improved though.

Some prominent index foraminifera for the Lower Upper Campanian/ Upper lower Campanian found are these:


Neoflabellina buticula






Stensioeina pommerana







Bolivinoides decoratus (var. decoratus ?)





Learn more about our findings at
Laegerdorf Sample 22

Incoming samples week 9-10

A core sample from Cape Hatteras with 72 single plastic bags representing 190m in depth came in. A chart on the abundance of foraminifera at all depth-levels will help to start with the most promising parts. The core ranges from recent to probably Miocene. This valuable sample definitely needs a close investigation and processing.

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Incoming Samples 2010 Weeks 4+5

An envelope from Michael (Louisville, Kentucky / USA) arrived with about 40 single forams from the Mississippian and Pennsylvanian: huge Fusulinids (see drawing of parafusulinid), Orbitulinas and Endothyras. See the interesting blog Louisville Fossils. Now I have first Paleozoic forams - what an excitement. Thanks a lot Michael. I will send a package with European forams back for Herb.

Kirstens material from Australia has arrived, several samples from the beaches of Queensland, New South Wales and South Australia - 200-300g in total. In half of a spoon from Woolgoolga - Solitary Islands Marine Park, NSW I found about 100 forams ranging from Textularia, Miliolids, Elphidiums, Planorbulina, Cibicides to Globigerina, Globorotalia - o my God - there are about 200 spoons left, to be analyzed :) Thank you so much Kirsten.

Incoming Samples 2010 Weeks 1+2+3

Adrian sent several 10-20g samples among which are Fleury-la-Rivière, Lutetian, near Paris France. It is his 11th mailing. I plan to send some micro-shells back.

Akira kindly promised to sent some samples from Japan => the first from that part of the World !

Kirsten from Australia offered a package of different sand-samples. She will choose the best ones.