This inventory of Permian foraminifers and calcareous algae has been made for more than 5000 samples collected in six geographical areas (Fig.1). Almost all of them were taken from stratigraphical sections. This important and unique collection is kept at the Geological Museum of Lausanne (Switzerland) and are available on request to any further scientific investigations*.
Several people carried out the field work. However, only one person is reponsible for the determinations in generea and species of these samples. Therefore, this work method offers a good homogeny of namings and has saved a lot of discussions over nomenclature. Some colleagues may not agree with one or more of the namings and we accept their dissensions. Nevertheless we adopted this method because we are sure that the homogeny of namings vouches for best correlations in both biostratigraphical and paleogeographical investigations.
We already used with success this data set in geodynamical paleo-reconstruction maps (Jenny & Stampfli, 2000) (Chapter 3) and managed the same data through the Biograph Program (Savary & Guex, 1999) (Chapter 2). This program is able to compile a lot of data to extract maximal sets of intersecting taxa ranges. The objective was to establish discrete sequences of coexistence interval of taxa and ten to ensure good correlations for the different studied area
