Recent  

Ammonia beccarii was described from Rimini Beach in 1758. This taxon has often been mistaken with other species in the past. Recent studies assessed the biometry of Ammonia species and integrated it with genetic data but relied on a few large and dead specimens only. In a comprehensive approach, we assessed the whole living Ammonia assemblage near the type locality of A. beccarii and identified parameters which are robust and facilitate a secure species identification.

We use marine microfossil (dinocyst) assemblage data as well as seismic and tectonic investigations to reconstruct the oceanographic history south of Australia 37–20 Ma as the Tasmanian Gateway widens and deepens. Our results show stable conditions with typically warmer dinocysts south of Australia, which contrasts with the colder dinocysts closer to Antarctica, indicating the establishment of modern oceanographic conditions with a strong Southern Ocean temperature gradient and frontal systems.

In this study, we constructed an open dataset, which contains computed tomography (CT) data on nearly 500 vertebrate microfossils. We propose a semantic segmentation method for CT fish microfossil data based on deep learning (DL). We expect that our proposed method could be applied to CT data on other fossils with good performance. We also believe the fast-accumulating CT data on vertebrate microfossils might become a source of information-rich datasets for deep learning.