Advances in Cretaceous palaeontology and stratigraphy – Christopher John Wood Memorial Volume; editors' preface

Abstract

In the last week of January 2016, the ‘Cretaceous community’ lost another of their prominent members, Chris Wood. During recent decades, Chris had been active in the United Kingdom as well as in mainland Europe, particularly in Germany and Poland. Several years ago he had been forced to leave the ranks of Associate Editors with Cretaceous Research, due to a severe illness that he was adamant to overcome. Later in 2016, two of us, fellow editors with that journal for a number of years, with the help of Rory Mortimore, approached former colleagues and friends of Chris's to contribute to a special issue. From the start, the idea has been to cover all aspects of Cretaceous stratigraphy and palaeontology. The geographical range of papers contained in the present issue extends from Northern Ireland to the Russian Caucasus Mountains, and in stratigraphical age, there is full coverage from the Jurassic–Cretaceous to the Cretaceous–Paleogene boundaries. Biologically speaking, taxonomic groups involved include dinoflagellates and calcareous nannoplankton on one end of the spectrum to mosasaurid and plesiosaur reptiles on the other.