Micropaleontology and biostratigraphy of the coastal basins of West Africa

Abstract

The West African Coastal sedimentary basins are mostly "open"-type basins, which originated as a result of the break-up of the Gondwana and the separation of Africa and South America. Several of the basins are merely separated by thin coastal strips and they show far-reaching uniformity in their sedimentary sequences and fossil faunas. Almost all the basins, from Angola to Senegal, have a non-marine beginning followed by the development of marine sedimentation in Aptian-Albian time and continuing into the Tertiary. Most of the basins have yielded many important diagnostic index microfossils (foraminifera and ostracoda) which are different from those from the Boreal, Mediterranean and Pacific regions. These fossils, which have previously only been described in private unpublished company reports or scattered in various journals and bulletins published in different languages are assembled, described, illustrated and correlated in this single volume. The stratigraphic subdivisions in the different coastal basins from Angola to Senegal are simplified, described and their microfossil content listed. Three general charts listing the important foraminifera (benthonic and planctonic) and ostracod species with their straigraphic range emphasize the usefulness of these fossils as a most important tool in the study of the stratigraphy of the economically interesting sedimentary sequences of coastal West Africa. © 1986.