Canada - Palaeobiogeography, palaeoecology and stratigraphy of bryozoan faunas and sediments, Ca and Norw Upper Palaeozoic boreal realm

Bryozoans are among the most diverse and most common fossils in Carboniferous and Permian rocks of the present day Arctic. They are rivaled only by brachiopods and echinoderms, and have been extensively studied in the stratigraphic type areas of Russia an d elsewhere. In recent years stratigraphic distribution of rich bryozoan faunas from Svalbard has been published, and they have also been briefly described from shallow cores from the Barents Shelf. In Svalbard, Greenland and the Canadian arctic islands, bryozoans formed small to medium sized reefs and bioherms, and they are distributed in large numbers especially in the carbonate rocks in these areas. For the time being very little is known regarding the taxonomic composition of the Canadian faunas. The study will be based on samples collected in Canada during the last 25 years, which are now housed at the Geological Survey of Canada and the Department of Geology and Geophysics, University of Calgary. Most of the samples have been collected within projec ts led by Professors Benoit Beauchamp and Charles M. Henderson (both now at the University of Calgary). Bryozoans are mainly studied from thin sections of carbonate rocks. A large amount of thin sections are available for study already, but new ones have to be prepared during this project. As an integral part of the study, surrounding rock matrix, mainly carbonates, will be also be investigated in thin sections and in scanning electron microscope using different analytical methods. This will tell much abo ut the depositional environment and may also provide new knowledge in porosity studies, which in turn may prove useful for inclusion of Barents Shelf samples. The published record of Carboniferous and Permian bryozoans is huge, and new data obtained in th e present project will prove very useful in further statistical treatment of bryozoan species occurrences in time and space. The main purpose of this pilot project is to generate data for a larger project.