GEOFF NORRIS is Director of the Palynology Laboratory and a professor in the Department of Geology. Geoff is broadly interested in all aspects of palynology, particularly as it relates to solution of stratigraphic problems. He has a particular interest in Mesozoic-Cenozoic palynology and the integration of information from all available taxa marine and terrestrial. He has published extensively on embryophyte spores and pollen, dinoflagellates, and fungal palynomorphs, and believes that the successful application of palynology to stratigraphy must rest on a firm, high resolution, taxonomic base.

Geoff has recently completed a monograph on spores, pollen, and dinoflagellates from Paleocene-Pliocene deltaic and inner shelf sequences in the Beaufort-Mackenzie Basin, NWT. This has allowed integration of sedimentological and faunal data into a robust chronostratigraphic framework capable of extension across major facies boundaries, and capable of rigorous application to sequence stratigraphic models. He has extended this to other Cenozoic basins in the eastern and western Canadian Arctic and is hoping to contribute to the puzzling diversity changes and evolution-extinction patterns - and lack thereof - of high latitude floras.

His long-term interest in high-level taxonomy and phylogenetic relationships of dinoflagellates cysts initially started with W.A.S. Sarjeant in the early 1960's has culminated in a joint publication with several co-authors of a classification which appears to satisfactorily integrate existing knowledge of the cysts and thecae of living and fossil dinoflagellates. Much of the credit for bringing this work to completion rests with Rob Fensome who actively pursued this research while a post-doctoral fellow in the Toronto Palynology Laboratory and formerly with Bill Sarjeant, University of Saskatchewan. Rob Fensome and Geoff Norris were also invited to prepare summary of Cretaceous dinoflagellates and spores and pollen for the DNAG volume on the Canadian craton which appeared recently.

Geoff's earlier interests in the non-marine Cretaceous of the Moose River Basin, James Bay Lowland, Ontario was recently augmented by the completion of a doctoral thesis by Pierre Zippi. He proved that spores and pollen could be used to accurately date the main phase of sedimentation which occupied a relatively brief period of time in the mid-Cretaceous. Further, Pierre showed that the lacustrine environments were populated by distinctive non-marine dinoflagellates and zygnematacean cysts, representing some of the earliest records of these freshwater algae. Comparable cysts in recent and sub-recent lake sediments appear to offer the potential for tracking pH and Eh changes associated with global change phenomena.

He has just completed a paper with Oyuang Shu (a Visiting Scientist from the Nanjing Institute of Palaeontology, PRC) on Early Triassic spore-pollen assemblages from northwest China. This is important because the Dalongkou site in the Junggar Basin, Xinjiang is a potential candidate for a global continental Permian-Triassic boundary reference section.

Although most of the work done in our laboratory is focussed on projects for which funding has been procured from national and international sources, we do take the opportunity to welcome undergraduates to investigate projects of their choosing which can be researched using facilities in the Palynology Laboratory. In this way, Lee Fortner wrote a B.Sc. thesis a couple of years ago on Silurian acritarchs of the Rochester Shale of the Niagara Escarpment. Lee has recently been revising for publication the taxonomy and biostratigraphy of this work and has been collaborating with Prof. H. Brett to place it in a sequence stratigraphic framework.

MARTIN J. HEAD is an independent consulting palynologist as well as a research associate, sessional lecturer, and graduate faculty member in the Department of Geology. His current research interests are in the biostratigraphy, paleoecology, and taxonomy of Upper Cretaceous and Cenozoic dinoflagellates. He is a veteran of two ODP cruises (Legs 105 and 144) and is developing a magnetostratigraphically-constrained Neogene dinoflagellate biostratigraphy for the North Atlantic based on DSDP and ODP cores. This work has been supported by the Palynology Industrial Consortium comprising Amoco, Phillips, Unocal, Elf-Aquitaine, Norsk Hydro, and Statoil. Research has shown that many dinoflagellate and acritarch events are synchronous over large areas of the North Atlantic. This suggests exciting possibilities for refining the biostratigraphy of shelf and deltaic sequences where mineralized microfossil zonations are sometimes difficult to apply, and for the precise dating of high-latitude sites where other microfossils are sparse or absent.

Along with his work on deep-sea deposits, Martin has been examining neritic assemblages from classic Pliocene onshore sections in northwestern Europe including the Royal Society borehole at Ludham, the Chillesford Church beds, the Coralline Crag (all eastern England), the St. Erth Beds (southwestern England), and the Bosc d'Aubigny deposits (France). These studies are helping to establish the superiority of dinoflagellates for Plio-Pleistocene paleoclimatic reconstruction in Northwestern Europe a field traditionally dominated by spore-pollen and foraminiferal studies.

Martin is also studying the taxonomy and morphology of Cenozoic dinoflagellates, with emphasis on cyst wall ultrastructure. This character is best explored with a finely-tuned SEM and so is often neglected in dinoflagellate taxonomy. The payoff is not entirely esoteric. Recent taxonomic work has enhanced the paleoecological and biostratigraphic utility of several frequently confused species of the important Cenozoic genera Habibacysta, Tectatodinium, Bitectatodinium, and Filisphaera.

When Martin is not doing palynology or teaching, he can be found at his computer working on the CAP finances and membership files, editing the AASP Newsletter, or updating the AASP Web site.

LAURENT DE VERTEUIL is a post-doctoral fellow in the Department, having recently gained his PhD from the University Toronto. As an undergraduate he visited the Calvert Cliffs in Maryland and became fascinated with the exquisitely preserved dinocysts he found there. The Chesapeake material provided the basis for his dissertation, fieldwork for which was partially funded by an AASP Student Scholarship. Laurent's research tries to balance his theoretical interest in dinocyst morphology and taxonomy, with a pragmatic approach to allostratigraphic basin analysis. For example, he completed an original evaluation and synthesis of published cyst terminology and applied the results in describing stratigraphically useful new taxa. He developed a ten part Miocene zonation for the coastal plain formations and used it to delineate the subsurface allostratigraphy in Virginia, Delaware and New Jersey. His dinocyst stratigraphy of the Salisbury Embayment and adjacent Baltimore Canyon Trough represents the state-of-the-art in Miocene chronostratigraphic correlation for these basins. These taxonomic and stratigraphic studies formed the core of his thesis, which he defended in January. The results are presented in two papers that will appear together next year in a Micropaleontology Special Publication.

Following a summer stint at Exxon Production Research Company, where he demonstrated that the zonation developed onshore in Maryland could be applied to industry and COST wells off New Jersey, Laurent was accepted to sail as palynologist on the ODP New Jersey Sea Level cruise (Leg 150, summer 1993). With calcareous dissolution affecting most of the Neogene sections recovered from the New Jersey continental slope, the shipboard dinocyst stratigraphy provided a solid correlation framework between all the Leg 150 sites. These data, plus later shore-based work, still provide the only sure Neogene correlations between the continental slope and complimentary drilling in the New Jersey Coastal Plain (ODP Leg 150X).

Three onshore boreholes in New Jersey (at Cape May, Atlantic City and Island Beach), plus the Leg 150 sites on the continental slope and rise, form part of the ongoing New Jersey Transect Project, whose aim is to document the Oligocene to Recent record of sea-level change and sequence architecture on this margin. A dip-parallel series of shelf sites, that will be drilled in 1997, will complete the transect. Laurent is the dinocyst stratigrapher for the New Jersey Transect Project and in addition to his key responsibility for erecting the Neogene chronostratigraphic framework for the project, he is actively helping to delineate and interpret stratigraphic sequences.

Samples from New Jersey Transect sites provide some material for a related project that is being funded by a consortium of five oil industry majors. The Integrated Neogene Geochronology And Sequence Stratigraphy Project is coordinated from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution by William Berggren, and is beginning work on integrating the next generation Neogene timescale with well-constrained sequence records from basins with high-resolution seismic and biostratigraphic data sets, and well-studied continuous cores. As a post-doc with this project, Laurent is responsible for the dinocyst horizons and palynofacies, and is working with Marie-Pierre Aubry (calc. nannos.), William Berggren (planktonic forams.), Anne Boersma and Mimi Katz (benthic forams.), and Kenneth Miller (strontium isotopes).

In August, at the SEPM Congress in Florida, Laurent summarized his results from the middle Atlantic Coastal Plain to an audience composed mostly of Atlantic and Gulf coastal plain stratigraphers. In the Neogene of Florida, where shallow water carbonate systems are difficult to correlate, dinocysts have the potential to impact the resolution of some long-standing basic questions in the regional stratigraphy, including the timing of major oceanographic and tectonic events in the history of the Florida Platform. Combining dinocyst and strontium stratigraphy, and calcareous biostratigraphy wherever available, is providing the key to inter-regional chronostratigraphic correlation on the U.S. Atlantic margin.

Most recently, Laurent has begun to explore opportunities in low latitude palynology, particularly in hydrocarbon-producing areas such as Venezuela, and his native Trinidad. In July he attended the joint Caribbean Geological Conference/Geological Society of Trinidad and Tobago meeting in Port of Spain, and was encouraged by the extent of biostratigraphic input into local exploration and production. When asked to comment on future directions in his career, Laurent managed only "Have scope, will travel."

FLORIN NEUMANN is a PhD candidate with interests mainly in dinocyst taxonomy, biostratigraphy, and palaeoecology. He worked initially on Late Cretaceous cysts, but for his Ph.D. project, which is supervised by M. J. Head and G. Norris, he has switched to Cenozoic material. Florin earned the degree of Master of Palynology from the University of Liège (Belgium), with a thesis on the taxonomy of Campanian dinocysts from the Nevele borehole (Western Flanders).

At the University of Toronto he studied dinocysts and pollen from the Kanguk Formation on Banks Island (NWT). Preliminary fission-track data from a tephra bed within Kanguk suggested a latest Maastrichtian age for this formation, which was usually considered to span the Campanian-Maastrichtian interval. Florin proved conclusively that samples from below and above the tephra bed were Late Campanian, and it was recognized that the fission-track dating method used in this instance was in need of further refinement.

Florin is now working on a Ph.D. thesis on the distribution of dinocysts in Pliocene deposits in areas adjacent to the Panama isthmus, based chiefly on DSDP/ODP samples. He is developing a dinocyst biostratigraphy for the area, and test-ing whether the palaeobiogeography of Pliocene cyst-producing dinoflagellates reflects the impact of a classical vicariant event, namely the emergence of the Panama isthmus at approximately 3.5 Ma. Part of this work was included in a presentation at the Fourth Canadian Palaeontology Conference (1994), which received the best student paper award.

Florin has been recently selected as shipboard palynologist for ODP Leg 165 (Caribbean Ocean History and K/T Boundary Event). Drilling at the five sites proposed for this leg will address two major themes, the nature of the K/T boundary, and the influence of tropical seas on global ocean history and climate evolution. Objectives range from the study of ejecta mechanisms of the Chicxulub impact event to the examination of effects of the late Neogene closing of low-latitude oceanic gateways.

Florin has been a recipient of the prestigious University of Toronto Connaught Research Fund Scholarship; in 1995 he was awarded the American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists Student Scholarship.

Recent Publications.

de Verteuil, L., and G. Norris, 1995. Miocene dinoflagellate cyst chronostratigraphy integrates U.S. Atlantic Margin outcrops with offshore seismic in an allostratigraphic framework. First SEPM Congress on Sedimentary Geology, St. Pete Beach, Florida, August, 1995. Congress Program and Abstracts Volume 1, p. 124.

de Verteuil, L., and G. Norris, 1995. The role of dinoflagellate cyst stratigraphy and palynofacies in Oligocene-Miocene sequence analysis, ODP New Jersey Transect. 28th Meeting American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists, Ottawa, Ontario, October, 1995.

de Verteuil, L., (in press); Data report: Upper Cenozoic dinoflagellate cysts from the continental slope and rise off New Jersey, ODP Leg 150. In G. Mountain, K.G. Miller, and P. Blum (eds.) Ocean Drilling Program Leg 150 Scientific Results.

de Verteuil, L., 1995. Miocene dinoflagellate cyst taxonomy and biostratigraphy of the Chesapeake Group, Salisbury Embayment, U.S.A. Ph.D. dissertation, Graduate Department of Geology, University of Toronto, 465 pp.

de Verteuil, L., and G. Norris, (In review). Miocene dinoflagellate cyst zonation and subsurface allostratigraphy of the Chesapeake Group, Salisbury Embayment, U.S.A. Micropaleontology Special Publication. 105 manuscript pages, 25 text-figures, 8 tables, 11 photographic plates.

de Verteuil, L., and G. Norris, (In review). Structure and homology in dinoflagellate cysts, with examples from the Miocene of Maryland and Virginia. Micropaleontology Special Publication. 125 manuscript pages, 35 text-figures, 2 tables, 18 photographic plates.

de Verteuil, L., and G. Norris, (In review). Upper Miocene Geonettia clineae Gen. et sp. nov., an opportunistic coastal embayment dinoflagellate of the Homotryblium Complex. Submitted to Palynology. 52 manuscript pages, 3 text-figures, 6 photographic plates.

de Verteuil, L., and G. Norris, 1992. Miocene protoperidiniacean dinocysts from the coastal plain of Maryland and Virginia. In M.J. Head and J.H. Wrenn (eds.), Neogene and Quaternary dinoflagellate cysts and acritarchs. American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists Foundation, Dallas: 391-430; text-fig. 1-11, table 1, pls. 1-12.

Fensome, R., and G. Norris, 1994a. "Dinoflagellates". In W.G.E. Caldwell and D.F. Stott (eds.), Sedimentary Cover of the Craton, Canada-Cretaceous. Decade of North American Geology, Geol. Soc. Am., Volume D-1, 370.

Fensome, R., and G. Norris, 1994b. "Terrestrial palynomorphs, exclusive of Megaspores". In W. G. E. Caldwell and D. F. Stott (eds.), Sedimentary Cover of the Craton, Canada-Cretaceous. Decade of North American Geology, Geol. Soc. Am. Volume D-1, 371.

Fensome, R. A., F. J. R. Taylor, G. Norris, W. A. S. Sarjeant, D. I. Wharton, and G. L. Williams, 1993. A classification of living and fossil dinoflagellates. Micropaleontology, Special Publication Number 7, 351 pp.

Head, M. J., 1993. Dinoflagellate cysts, sporomorphs, and other palynomorphs from the marine uppermost Pliocene St. Erth Beds, Cornwall, southwestern England. The Paleontological Society, Memoir 31:1-62.

Head, M. J., 1994. Morphology and paleoenvironmental significance of the Cenozoic dinoflagellate genera Habibacysta and Tectatodinium. Micropaleontology 40(4):289-321, 11 pls.

Head, M. J., 1995 (submitted). Paleoecological and taxonomic revision of late Cenozoic dinoflagellates from the Royal Society borehole at Ludham, eastern England. Submitted to Journal of Paleontology, MS: 110 pp., 11 pls, 3 figs.

Head, M. J., 1995. Modern dinoflagellate cysts and their biological affinities. In J. Jansonius and D.C. McGregor (eds.), Palynology: principles and applications. American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists Foundation, College Station, Texas. (In press, 49 pp.)

Head, M. J., Pliocene dinoflagellate cysts and paleoenvironments of the Coralline Crag deposits of Suffolk, eastern England. Palaeontology (In prep.)

Head, M. J., editor (with contributions from L. E. Edwards, J. K. Garrett, M. J. Head, J. K. Lentin, F. Marret, K. Matsuoka, J. Matthiessen, J. O'Mahony, X. Sun, L. de Verteuil, and D. Zevenboom), 1993. A forum on Neogene and Quaternary dinoflagellate cysts: The edited transcript of a round table discussion held at the Third Workshop on Neogene and Quaternary Dinoflagellates; with taxonomic appendix. Palynology 17: 201-239; 11 pls.

Head, M. J., and G. Norris, 1995. Pliocene and lower Pleistocene dinoflagellates and acritarchs of the North Atlantic: taxonomy, magnetobiostratigraphy, and paleoecology. American Association of Stratigraphic Palynologists, 28th Annual Meeting, Ottawa, Ontario. Abstract.

Leg 150 Shipboard Scientific Party, 1994. Site reports: Site 902, Site 903, Site 904, Site 905, and Site 906. In G. Mountain, K. G. Miller, and P. Blum (eds.), Ocean Drilling Program Leg 150 Initial Reports, 885 pp.

Miall, A. D., and G. Norris, (In press). Stratigraphy and palynology of Dome Crocker 1-53 Well, Canadian Arctic. Bulletin of Canandian Petroleum Geology (currently being revised).

Norris, G. (In press, 1995) Palynostratigraphic analysis of Imperial Adgo F-28 well, Beaufort-Mackenzie Basin, NWT: zonation, age relationships, depositional environments, and paleoclimates of Paleocene through Pliocene fluctuating deltaic-inner shelf sequences. Geological Survey of Canada Bulletin.

Ouyang, S., and G. Norris. Early Triassic spore-pollen floras from the Junggar Basin, Xinjiang Province, northwest China. in prep. Review of Palaeobotany and Palynology.

Zippi, P., and G. Norris. Early Cretaceous angiosperm pollen from the Mattagami Formation, Moose River Basin, Ontario: ultrastructure and evolution. in prep. Micropaleontology.

Zippi, P., and G. Norris. Freshwater algae from the Mattagami Formation (Albian), Ontario: paleoecology and botanical affinities. in prep. Palynology.

Zippi, P., P. M. Welbourne, and G. Norris. The potential of Peridinium cysts and Pediastrum coenobia and other algal microfossils from lake sediments as indicators of recent lake acidification. in prep. Journal of Paleolimnology.

* Present address: Martin J. Head Department of Earth Sciences, Brock University, 500 Glenridge Avenue St. Catharines, Ontario, L2S 3A1, Canada
 

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  Note: This article appeared in CAP Newsletter 18(2):17-22, 1995. Address updated December 30 2007.