186-6 Ninety-Five Years of Research into Pre-Carboniferous Foraminifera of the Western Hemisphere

Session: New Approaches to Old Fossil Collections (Posters)

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The study of Pre-Carboniferous foraminifera in the western hemisphere spans nearly a century, beginning in the United States in the 1930s and early 1940s with the foundational works of Moreman, Thomas, Miller and Carmer, Ireland, Grubbs, Dunn, and Cushman and Stainbrook. These early researchers described foraminifers from Silurian and Devonian carbonate sequences originally deposited in paleobasins of Laurentia, now located in the contemporary states of Oklahoma, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri. Most of the reported foraminifers were agglutinated, but the authors Thomas, Miller and Carmer, and Cushman and Stainbrook also reported calcareous foraminifers in Upper Devonian strata of Iowa. These authors established thirteen new foraminiferal genera and described numerous new species, assigning many of the unilocular and bichambered species to genera characteristic of Holocene deep-sea environments. These pioneering contributions laid the groundwork for subsequent taxonomic and stratigraphic studies.

Between the 1940s and 1980s, researchers including Stewart, Miller, Browne, Ireland, Mound, McClellan, Gutschick, and the Conkins expanded the taxonomic and geographic scope of Pre-Carboniferous agglutinated foraminiferal research into Indiana, Ohio, Western New York, Kansas, Nevada, and Kentucky in the USA. Loranger and Toomey identified multiple calcareous species in thin sections from the Upper Devonian of Alberta, Canada. Pre-Carboniferous foraminifers of South America have only more recently come under investigation by Vachard with coauthors and G. Nestell with coauthors.

Re-examining the type specimens of the collections of the authors listed above, which are present in several regional museums, mostly in the United States, should refine our understanding of the diversity and evolutionary development of early foraminifers as well as their uses in biostratigraphy.

Geological Society of America Abstracts with Program. Vol. 57, No. 6, 2025

doi: 10.1130/abs/2025AM-10751

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