Introduction

For many decades, applied paleontology has concentrated on finding energy resources. Despite the extensive, but almost exclusive, use of micropaleontology in petroleum exploration during the last half-century, foraminifera were used much earlier to date strata in a water well near Vienna, Austria in 1877. Further studies followed in the United States, but it was primarily J. A. Udden of Augustana College (Illinois), who, in 1911, began to use microfossils to correlate water wells in the United States. Udden would later forsake academe to become head of the newly organized Bureau of Economic Geology of Texas, where he shifted application of microfossils from water to petroleum. Bandy et al. (1964a,b; 1965a,b) were among only a handful of workers during the succeeding years who examined the response of foraminiferal populations to environmental disturbance (large inputs of sewage in shallow marine waters). Bandy et al.’s studies lay dormant, however, probably because the environmental movement had not yet fully developed and because of the heavy emphasis of applied micropaleontology on petroleum exploration (Bandy’s results may also have been confounded by the effects of low salinity; see Debenay et al., Ch. 2).