Towards quantitative environmental reconstructions from ancient non-analogue microfossil assemblages: Ecological preferences of Paleocene - Eocene dinoflagellates

Crucially, our work shows that the validation and quantification of ecological signals by independent environmental proxy data provides the opportunity to extract more quantitative information from a wide range of (non-analogue) microfossil assemblages. While this approach is not limited to any specific group of microfossils (or macrofossils), we stress that proper calibration datasets, high-quality sedimentological and geochemical proxy records, are needed and should ideally have decent geographical coverage and include one or more environmental perturbations. Using this approach such empirical relations can be established for a wide range of microfossil groups that have highly complementary geological records, which increases the value of existing data and ensures future application of microfossil-based paleoecology.