Personal history of my study on radiolarian biostratigraphy

Abstract

I have started to study the recent radiolarian biostratigraphy, when I have met Prof. E.F.Pessagno of UTD (University of Texas at Dallas), who presented an excellent view of a radiolarian body extracted from a Mesozoic siliceous sedimentary rock, June 4, 1976, at International Meeting of IGCP 115 (Siliceous deposits of the Circum-Pacific region) held at USGS, Menlo Park, California. During my stay in Canada and US, I informed to Prof. Pessgno, where I was, and asked to teach me how to separate the fossils from siliceous rocks, and how to examine them. I moved from Canada, to Harvard and finally to UT at Austin. February 16, 1977, I flied from Austin to Dallas-Fortworth, Prof. Pessagno kindly sent a guide who can understand Japanese in order to bring me from the airport to the campus of his lab. Prof. Pessagno demonstrated how to treat the rock-specimen and to separate the fossils and how to observe under SEM (Scanning Electoron Microscope), and suggested me what kind of literature is good for us to study the radiolarian biostratigraphy. After my sabbatical leave, I return to Nagoya; fortunately, I have got a budget for the scientific study in the fall of 1978 in order to purchase an inexpensive SEM (JM-T20) in our lab. The first discovery of a Jurassic radiolaria had been made by a student (Sakai, 1979). Thereafter, we have worked for the evidence of wide distribution of Jurassic formations in the Mino area, central Japan. The results have been published as an authorized paper in Proceedings of Japan Academy (Mizutani et al., 1981). This paper, entitled “Personal history on my study of radiolarian biostratigraphy”, as noted above, has outlined the memories of my own study on the radiolarian biostratigraphy particularly in relation to the Pessagno’s school of UTD.