LONG-TERM EVOLUTIONARY TRENDS WITHIN BENTHIC FORAMINIFERA

Foraminifera are single-celled protists that evolved and diversified throughout the Phanerozoic Eon and are found throughout marine ecosystems. They are used as proxies for paleoclimate reconstructions because the composition of their tests reflects conditions of their environment. Furthermore, foraminifera diversity and abundance are sensitive to several environmental and evolutionary factors, including ocean chemistry and climate. Over 47,000 foraminifera fossil occurrences have been recorded in The Paleobiology Database (PBDB). A preliminary examination of the database found biases within the foraminifera records towards certain intervals of interest and severely under-reported occurrences during most time intervals. For example, while the Late Cretaceous has a wealth of occurrence data and is thus likely reflective of true foraminiferal abundances, the Cambrian Period has little information about the species present. Foraminifera’s presence in the Cambrian is well known, and this merely reflects what data has been entered into the PBDB. This research project focuses on alleviating these biases by aggregating published foraminifera data based on occurrence, test mineralogy, etc. which can be added to the PBDB and greatly improve the foraminiferal information in this dataset. Moreover, compiling this foraminifera database will provide data on long-term evolutionary trends within the benthic foraminiferal community. The dataset will be built by recording the accepted names, life position, wall type, time interval, and location of every genus recorded in Loeblich and Tappan (1988), an exhaustive synthesis of foraminifera genera (up to its publication date) reflecting the opinion of a single pair of authors. Using this data, we tracked the diversity of these organisms through the Phanerozoic Eon, compared the relative proportion of calcareous vs. agglutinated foraminifera, and graphed the overall diversity. Comprehensive datasets such as this are essential for research about faunal diversity and paleoclimate records, ocean chemistry, and conservation. While an exhaustive foraminiferal dataset is beyond the scope of this undergraduate thesis, the dataset will be an important step towards incorporating foraminiferal records in Phanerozoic scale diversity assessments.