Sinem Tanrikulu,^1,* James A. Doyle,^2,** Irina Delusina<sup>3,***

1</sup>aTurkish Petroleum Research Center, Ankara/06530, Turkey
²bEvolution and Ecology, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA
³cEarth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA

^*Sinem Tanrikulu received a BSc from the Department of Geological Engineering at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey, in 2011, and was awarded a government scholarship to conduct MSc studies abroad. In 2015 she earned her MSc in geology from the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Davis, under the supervision of James A. Doyle and Irina Delusina, for the study on Early Cretaceous spores and pollen of the Glen Rose Formation that forms the basis of this article. Currently she is working at Turkish Petroleum in Ankara and pursuing PhD studies at the Middle East Technical University on Silurian palynomorphs (spores, acritarchs and chitinozoans) of the Tauride Mountains.
^**James A. Doyle received his PhD at Harvard in 1970, working on angiosperm pollen of the Potomac Group and its evolutionary implications. As a postdoc at the Smithsonian Institution in 1971 and a faculty member at the University of Michigan until 1978, he extended this work to angiosperm leaf floras, in collaboration with Leo Hickey, and to early angiosperm pollen from Gabon and Congo, with palynologists at Elf-Aquitaine. He moved to the University of California, Davis, in 1978, officially retiring in 2013. In the 1980s his research emphasis shifted to phylogenetic analyses of living and fossil seed plants and basal angiosperms, particularly Annonaceae and Chloranthaceae. Recently he has been returning to his paleobotanical roots with analyses of the position of fossils in molecular phylogenies of living angiosperms and reassessment of Cretaceous stratigraphic problems.
^***Irina Delusina is a project scientist in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of California, Davis. She graduated from St. Petersburg University, Russia, and completed her PhD at the Institute of Geology of the Estonian Academy of Sciences in 1989. She then received an Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung postdoctoral fellowship to work at the University of Hohenheim, Germany. She is using palynology to reconstruct Quaternary paleoclimates in different regions of the world, including northwestern Russia, California, the Chukchi Sea and the Caribbean Basin, and she served as palynologist on a cruise to Baffin Bay to study the stratigraphy of Cretaceous sediments.