Abstract

Whenever a new dinosaur is discovered, the news immediately hits the headlines.  However in the Micropaleontological world, equally groundbreaking discoveries often remain unnoticed.  Over the last decade, researchers from the Dhahran area (KFUPM and Aramco) have made micropaleontological discoveries that will change what is now taught in Historical Geology classes, as well as what is written in the Paleontology textbooks.  In my presentation I will review five such new discoveries:

 • The oldest (Ediacaran) microfossils ever found in the Kingdom, and their significance for the evolutionary history of the Foraminifera

• The oldest evidence of fossil land plants in the Ordovician Hanadir Formation

• The oldest multichambered foraminifera from the Silurian Qusaiba Formation

• The oldest planktonic foraminifera from the Middle Jurassic Dhruma Formation

• The early evolution of agglutinated foraminifera with complex inner stuctures in the Eocene Rashrashiya Formation

The Phanerozoic sediment column in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia undoubtedly hides additional secrets that remain to be uncovered by curiosity-driven micropaleontological research.

Biography

Prof. Mike Kaminski did his undergraduate degree at Rutgers University and then studied in the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution/MIT Joint Program in Oceanography, graduating with a PhD degree in Oceanography. He did post-doctoral fellowships at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and at GEOMAR (Institute for Marine Geowissenschaften) in Kiel, Germany. He worked as a Lecturer and later as a Reader at University College London in the Department of Earth Sciences. In 2007, he defended his Habilitation degree at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Geological Sciences, in Kraków. Since 2010 he has been employed at King Fahd University of Petroleum & Minerals in Dhahran Saudi Arabia, first as an Associate Professor, then as Full Professor, and since 2022 as Distinguished Professor in the Department of Geosciences. In 2021 he was elected a Foreign Member of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences in Kraków. He has authored numerous books and more than 250 scientific articles, mostly on the topic of Micropaleontology (Foraminifera). He is the author of the currently-used Classification of the Agglutinated Foraminifera, and has published the Phanerozoic diversity record of this group of microfossils.  He has participated in three Ocean Drilling Program expeditions, and in 2009 he received the W.Storrs Cole Award from the Geological Society of America. In 2023 he received the Bene Merito Award from the Geological Society of Poland. He is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the scientific journal Micropaleontology (Micropaleontology Press, New York).