Global Database of Foraminiferal Organic Linings: ForamL Version 1.3
Description
This database is an updated collection of references to images of Foraminiferal Organic Linings (FOLs) published in the available scientific literature (see Godos et al., 2021). All organic linings are derived from recent marine samples and sedimentary rocks worldwide. The previous analysis of these publications resulted in a collection of 155 scientific reports, illustrating 614 foraminiferal organic linings. Here we presented an updated version of ForamL contains 207 additional images not published in Godos et al. (2021). Most of them have been published recently, since 2021. All of the 821 organic linings have been assigned to supraordinal groups of the phylum Foraminifera (Pawlowski et al. 2013), as well as to basic morphologic types of chamber arrangements. The database consists of three tables that cover the whole Phanerozoic, split into the Cenozoic, Mesozoic, and Paleozoic, and then to systems/periods such as the “modern period”, Quaternary, Neogene, Paleogene, Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, and older intervals. The ”modern period” is a very short artificial period created by the authors, encompassing foraminiferal organic linings collected from natural environments, representing both living and dead material. This group includes subfossil remains found in marine sediments that were not fully fossilized. They are considered to be relatively young on a geological scale, having come from periods too recent to be classified as true fossils. For each system, scientific publications are referenced chronologically by year of publication. The main criterion on which the available publications were evaluated in our analysis was the preparation methods: we included the research based on the on palynological procedures. The procedures included treating samples with hydrochloric acid (HCl) to remove carbonates, followed by hydrofluoric acid (HF) to remove silicates from the sample. The next step was to sieve the extracted organic matter through a 10 or 15 or 20 μm sieve to separate larger organic particles, including palynomorphs with foraminiferal organic linings, for further preparation of palynological slides.