Late Cenozoic Invertebrates, Protists and Fish of the Tropical Eastern Pacific Ocean: Database for Comparisons with Caribbean Taxa Through Time

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9705289 COLLINS The emergence of the Isthmus of Panama split apart a single tropical ocean, an event which had a profound impact on organismal evolution, ecologic systems and oceanic circulation. Fossils preserved in Eastern Pacific and Caribbean deposits comprise successive tropical American biotas that changed dramatically through the last 15 million years in response to the constriction and closure of the great Caribbean - Pacific seaway. Research based on Pacific and Caribbean collections of fossils will address these changes. The main goal of this project is a paleobiotic survey of shallow-water fossil faunas of coastal Ecuador, for comparison with Caribbean faunas of similar age and environment that were collected previously. This project, by Laurel Collins and colleagues, involves collecting Neogene marine fossils in Ecuador, preparing and identifying these collections, determining the ages and paleoenvironments of their stratigraphic sequences, designing a new database for the data, making the project's data available on the Internet, and using the collections in research. The identified faunas will include calcareous nannoplankton, foraminifera, ahermatypic corals, bryozoans, echinoderms, mollusks, ostracods and fish. The new model for the database will track the progress of preparing collections and identifying taxa, aid in dating samples and correlating strata, and serve as the repository for all faunal occurrence data, maps, stratigraphic sections, and locality information. Research based on these data will result in the most accurate assessment to date of the long-term effects of environmental change and isolation on marine biotas, and the data model will set the standard for field-based paleobiotic surveys.