Nothia excelsa ( Grzybowski, 1898 ), 1993

Benedetti, A, 2017, Eocene / Oligocene deep-water agglutinated foraminifers (DWAF) assemblages from the Madonie Mountains (Sicily, Southern Italy), Palaeontologia Electronica 20 (1), pp. 1-66 : 19

Nothia excelsa ( Grzybowski, 1898)

Figure 12.9

1898 Dendrophrya excelsa ; Grzybowski, p. 272, pl. 10. figs. 1-4.

1960 Dendrophrya excelsa Grzybowski ; Geroch, p. 121, pl. 1, figs. 1-11.

1993 Nothia excelsa (Grzybowski) emend. Geroch and Kaminski, 1993 ; Kaminski and Geroch, p. 245, pl. 1, figs. 2-6, 15a, b.

2009 Nothia excelsa (Grzybowski) ; Kender, Kaminski and Jones, p. 493, pl. 1, fig. 5.

Material. 57 specimens from 21 samples.

Description. Tubular and flattened test, rarely branched, usually straight or curved. Wall thick, moderately coarse agglutinated, composed of quartz grains.

Distribution. Well-known species from Cretaceous to the late Eocene of Carpathians; described from the Miocene by Osterman and Spiegler (1996) and Kender et al. (2009).

Paleoecology. Nothia excelsa was regarded as an epifaunal deposit-feeders form colonizing turbiditic deposit surfaces ( Geroch and Kaminski, 1993); recently Kaminski et al. (2006) and Kender et al. (2008) set this species into the erect epifauna morphogroup M1.

Remarks. In the investigated samples this species usually occurs broken and fragmentated; only one branched specimen was found in the sample PC060603.

Figures

FIGURE 12. Scanning electron micrographs of Astrorhizida (1-13) and Saccamminidae (14-15) foraminifers from the Caltavuturo Formation cropping out at Portella Colla. 1-2, Rhabdammina discreta Brady, 1884, PCs0 (1) and PC060618 (2). 3, Rhabdammina eocenica Cushman and Hanna, 1927, PC060601. 4-5, Psammosiphonella cylindrica (Glaessner, 1937), PC11 (4) and PCs0 (5). 6-7, Psammosiphonella linearis (Brady, 1879), PC060618 (6) and PC11 (7). 8, Bathysiphon sp., MM12. 9, Nothia excelsa (Grzybowski, 1898), PC060603. 10, Nothia robusta (Grzybowski, 1898) with Ammolagena clavata (Jones and Parker, 1860), PC060621. 11, Nothia cf. latissima (Grzybowski, 1898), PC060624. 12-13, Rhizammina indivisa Brady, 1884, PC060621. 14-15, Psammosphaera irregularis (Grzybowski, 1896), PC13 (14) and PC22 (15). 16, Placentammna placenta (Grzybowski, 1898), PCs0. 17, Saccammina grzybowskii (Schubert, 1902), PC060621. Scale bar equals 0.5 mm.