Micropaleontology is the study of minute fossils, mostly created by single celled organisms. Our group works primarily with fossil microplankton obtained from ocean bottom sediments, and in particular with the siliceous microfossil groups radiolarians and diatoms. We study patterns of evolution, climate change, and how these forces have interacted over the last 60 million years. We also are building better tools for such research, such as large databases with distributional data for species over time, and software for data collection and analysis.
The material we study largely comes from deep sea sediment sections recovered by the international deep-sea drilling program, and we maintain a large modern Collection of such material, together with important historic materials such as the Ehrenberg Collection.
The remaining pages at this site describe our main research themes, group members, and publications. More information about the collections can be found at the Museum für Naturkunde website.
Announcements:
| 2024-01-03 | Another MOPGA-related preprint on EGUsphere! |
| 2023-07-25 | New MOPGA-related preprint on EGUsphere! |
| 2022-11-03 | New MOPGA-related publication! Together with other MOPGA laureates, our team members Gayane Asatryan, David Lazarus and Johan Renaudie published a "core concept" article aimed at a younger audience in Frontiers for Young Minds. |
| 2022-09-11 | Team members Gayane Asatryan, David Lazarus and Johan Renaudie presented our research at Interrad XVI in Ljubljana, Slovenia. |
| 2022-08-29 | Our team member, Gabrielle Rodrigues de Faria, presented her phd research at the ICP14 conference in Bergen, Oslo. |
| 2022-08-22 | Our team members, Gayane Asatryan and Volkan Özen, presented their work at the CBEP12 conference in Bremen, Germany. |
| 2022-07-06 | Our team member Volkan Özen participated in the Urbino Summer School in Paleoclimatology. |
| 2022-07-04 | Sarah's massive monograph on Late Neogene Equatorial Pacific Lophophaenidae is out! |
| 2022-06-24 | Dr Sophie Westacott, from Yale University, USA, spent two weeks with us this month to work on radiolarian taxonomy. |
| 2022-04-25 | Our team member, Johan Renaudie, participated in the Expedition 396 Sampling Party in Bremen. |
| 2022-03-28 | Our team member, Johan Renaudie, participated in the BioDEEPTime workshop in Erlangen. |
| 2021-11-29 | Veronica Carlsson, from the Université de Lille, France, came to spend a week with us to work together on AI-based automatic identification of Eocene radiolarians. |
| 2021-11-17 | Our PhD student from far away, Sarah Trubovitz, defended successfully her thesis at the University of Nevada in Reno! She will soon start a postdoc with NSF Fellowship in David Caron's lab at USC Los Angeles. |
| 2021-10-21 | Dr Margot Courtillat, from the Université de Perpignan Via Domitia, France, came to spend 2 weeks with us, to work together on the Neogene antarctic radiolarians of IODP Expedition 379. |
| 2021-08-06 | IODP Expedition 396 is on its way. Our group member, Johan Renaudie, will be collaborating on the results of the expedition as shore-based radiolarian specialist. |
| 2021-06-30 | Dave Lazarus officially retired today. He will nonetheless still be present and involved in our research, in his new role as Emeritus Curator. |
| 2021-06-28 | A new article, with contributions by David Lazarus and Johan Renaudie, came out, presenting the Triton database of Cenozoic planktonic foraminifera, an offshoot of the NSB database. This database should be released and accessible via the NSB website by early 2022. |
| 2021-06-01 | A new, massive historical collection of radiolarian and diatom slides arrived this month from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Those slides were instrumental in the CLIMAP project, and will continue to be used for climate research in the coming years, here in their new home at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. |
| 2020-12-29 | Dave's long-awaited book on the Paleobiology of Polycystine Radiolaria is finally published by Wiley-Blackwell, in the book series Topics in Paleobiology! |
| 2020-10-22 | Our new article, led by Sarah Trubovitz, on a comparison between equatorial pacific and antarctic Neogene radiolarian diversity and what it says about plankton response to climate change is out in Nature Communications! |
| 2020-03-15 | Our new article on the NSB database and all the changes we made to it during the last 8 years is out! |
| 2019-11-29 | In the context of a 'Fridays for Future'-related event, our team members Gabrielle Rodrigues de Faria and Johan Renaudie will be answering public questions about our climate-related research, as guests of the Museum Salon. |
| 2019-11-25 | Our team members Gabrielle Rodrigues de Faria and Volkan Özen will be presenting their PhD projects in the context of the Fachbereich Geowissenschaften seminar of the Freie Universität Berlin. |
| 2019-10-25 | Call for abstracts! Our team member Gayane Asatryan is co-convening a session at the next EGU General Meeting (3 to 8th May 2020) on Using Earth system science to understand climate change and its impacts. Submission deadline: 2020-01-15. |
| 2019-04-15 | Our team is getting bigger! We're happy to welcome among us Gabrielle Rodrigues de Faria and Volkan Özen, both as PhD students in the context of our MOPGA-funded project. |
| 2019-01-18 | Our team member Johan Renaudie is participating as radiolarian specialist for two months to IODP Expedition 379 to the Amundsen Sea, onboard the JOIDES Resolution. |
| 2018-12-06 | We are looking for 2 PhD students to work in the context of our MOPGA project! See job listings here and here. |
| 2018-11-08 | Our Preprint on the use of MobileNet neural network for closely-related radiolarian species identifications is out! |