Microfossils come the most common feature of the geological record, from the Precambrian to the Quaternary, and come detected inside virtually all marine and terrestrial sediments. When each Kingdom of life is represented in the microfossil record, a virtually all abundant forms come protist skeletons or nodules from either a phyla Chrysophyta, Pyrrhophyta, Sarcodina, acritarchs and chitinozoans together with pollen and spores from vascular plants.

Micropaleontology is traditionally divided into terzetto areas of survey on the basis of microfossil composition, which may be calcereous, siliceous, or organic. This section reflects differences in the laboratory processing & preparation of deposit & rock samples like than any taxanomic or ecological distinctions.

Calcareous microfossils
Chalky microfossils include Coccoliths, Foraminifera, Calcareous dinoflagellates, Ostracods, and Conodonts.

Siliceous microfossils
Siliceous microfossils include Diatoms, Radiolaria, and Silicoflagellates.

Organic microfossils
A learn of organic microfossils is known as palynology. Organic microfossils include pollen, spores, Chitinozoans, Scolecodonts, Acritarchs, Dinoflagellate cysts, and fungal remains.

Methods
Deposit or even even rock samples come collected from cores or outcropping, & the microfossils it contain extracted by a kind of physical & chemical laboratory techniques, including sieving, density separation by centrifuge, and chemical digestion of the unwanted fraction. the sequent concentrated sample of microfossils is so mounted in a slide for analysis, normally by weak microscope. Taxa come so identified & counted. a heavy many microfossils that a little deposit sample could typically yield allows the collection of statistically robust datasets which may be subjected to multivariate analysis.

Applications of Micropaleontology
Micropaleontology has proved an first-class convienence for sedimentary rock-body dating & for paleoenvironmental reconstruction, heavily utilized by petroleum geology, it has also noticed the total of supplementary non-orthodox applications, like its growing role within forensic police investigation.