Developing a new species-level database of Cretaceous calcareous nannoplankton occurrences – Uneptune

Calcareous nannofossils are abundant and globally distributed fossils that are widely used in the study of stratigraphy and palaeoclimate. A large number of nannofossil data have been generated over the past several decades, but the information is distributed across the published scientific literature in a wide variety of formats, and data compilation has focussed on the Cenozoic. In Cretaceous marine sediments, nannofossils are a key group of microfossils, and they have been extensively studied for both biostratigraphy and palaeoceanography. However, only a fraction of these data have been compiled. In order to exploit this archive of palaeontological information, we have (1) extended the capabilities of the Mikrotax database system to allow compilation of occurrence data, (2) tested this by compiling a large set of Cretaceous nannofossil occurrence records (Uneptune database), and (3) developed a suite of tools for displaying these data on the Nannotax database system, including biogeographic maps, time–latitude plots, and occurrence frequency range charts. For the Uneptune database, we selected a range of published high-quality Cretaceous nannofossil datasets, screening the data to standardise the taxonomy and revise the age models where appropriate. The resulting database includes around 7000 samples, 500 species, and 175 000 occurrence records, which is 3 times the size of the previous largest Neptune Cretaceous database.