Eocene to Early Miocene Benthic Foraminifera DSDP Leg 39, South Atlantic

Abstract

Few reports of benthic foraminiferal faunas from deep-sea cores of the Tertiary have been published. Notable exceptions are the works of Berggren (1972, 1975), Douglas (1973), and Vincent et al. (1974) on samples taken by the Deep Sea Drilling Project. Older works, providing the reference faunas for these deeper, open marine sections include Beckmann (1953), Bandy (1970), Cushman and Renz (1948), Cushman and Stainforth (1945), Palmer (1940), AGIP (1959), and Bermudez (1949): see Berggren and Phillips (1971) for a more extensive bibliography. Because of the time between publication of these two groups of works, and although some taxonomic revisions are presently in progress (for example, Tjalsma, personal communication), there is currently a lack of standardized and updated taxonomy. Consequently, the faunas reported here are given names directly from the older literature and the source of each name is listed in the Appendix. When the taxonomy is revised it will then be reasonably simple to incorporate the taxa listed in this report.