Introduction

Trinidad has a long history of investigation of fossil foraminifera. Following the classical ‘Report on the geology of Trinidad’ by Wall & Sawkins (1860) who drew attention to the presence of fossils ‘which might render important services to geological science’, it was Guppy (1863,1873) who first pointed out the presence of Tertiary foraminifera in Trinidad. He was also the first to illustrate some of them in 1894.

Applications of benthic foraminifera to stratigraphy were initiated about 1917 by W. F. Penny and P. W. Jarvis at the demand of Trinidad's expanding oil industry. In 1929 Cushman & Jarvis published a number of new benthic and planktic species from the Tertiary of Trinidad while, shortly before, Nuttall (1928) published a more comprehensive study on Oligo-Miocene benthic foraminifera from the Napa-rima region in southern Trinidad. This was also the first study on Trinidad foraminifera where the distribution of the species comprising a total of 144 taxa was plotted on a chart.

Following these pioneer studies which demonstrated the usefulness of the benthic species (the very frequent planktic forms were at the time almost completely ignored) to solve stratigraphic problems, oil companies began to establish their own micropaleon-tological laboratories. This increased the level of activity, and the initiative of some dedicated company paleontologists resulted in a number of detailed predominantly systematic studies on the Tertiary foraminifera, again still concentrating on benthic forms. Publications include those by Cushman & Stainforth (1945) and Cushman & Renz (1946, I947a,b, 1948) which span the interval Paleocene to Middle Miocene.