IN MEMORY OF FREDERICK T. BANNER

Abstract

Frederick Thomas Banner, a world-renowned scientist, expert on benthic and planktonic foraminifera, and friend and colleague to many micropaleontologists, died on the 16th February 2006 in his 76th year after a short illness. Fred’s diverse and pioneering studies on both benthic and planktonic foraminifera over a 40-year career have greatly influenced our science. He is perhaps best known for his work with Walter Blow on Oligocene to Quaternary globigerine biostratigraphy. Several classic papers, still relevant almost half a century later, resulted from this collaboration, which occurred whilst both Banner and Blow were employed by British Petroleum (BP). But Fred’s first love was larger benthic foraminifera, which he first worked with in Papua New Guinea in the mid 1950s. His job for Anglo-Iranian (later to become BP) was to produce a biostratigraphy of Oligo-Miocene reef limestones that were exposed as pinnacles in primary rainforest. Fred, as he always did, succeeded even in this very demanding environment. He also used this opportunity to visit the modern reefs off Port Moresby. His fondness of near-equatorial settings was rekindled later in his career through several visits and student fieldtrips to Freetown, Sierra Leone and Mombasa, Kenya. Unfortunately he was unable to publish much of his groundbreaking industrial research on larger benthic fora-minifera at the time, in the way he was able to publish on planktonics. Nonetheless, his many unpublished reports on the larger foraminifera of the Mesozoic of the Middle East and the Cenozoic of the Far East instantly became, and still remain, standard works within BP. Fred’s influence, however, was not restricted to his research contributions. In 1966 he left BP and joined University College Swansea where he started a subdepartment in Oceanography that was soon to become a full degree-granting department. This was …