Reed Wicander,^1,2,*,** Geoffrey Playfordhttps://orcid.org/0000-0002-3876-7907<sup>1,***

1</sup>School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD, Australia
²Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Central Michigan University, Mount Pleasant, MI, USA

^*CONTACT Reed Wicander wican1r@cmich.edu School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, QLD 4072, Australia
^**Reed Wicander is a professor emeritus of geology at Central Michigan University, USA, where he taught for 39 years. He is currently an adjunct professor in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Australia. He earned his BS degree in geology from San Diego State University in 1969 and his PhD degree from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1972 under the guidance of Dr Helen Tappan Loeblich and Dr Alfred R. Loeblich, Jr. His palynologic research focuses on Paleozoic acritarchs and prasinophytes, and he has published more than 50 peer-reviewed research papers during his career. He has also published numerous editions of both physical and historical geology textbooks with his long-time faculty colleague, Dr Stewart Monroe.
^***Geoffrey Playford is a graduate of the Universities of Western Australia (BSc Hons I, DSc) and Cambridge (PhD) and is currently a professor emeritus in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, The University of Queensland (UQ). While an honors student at The University of Western Australia (UWA), he was introduced to palynology by the inspirational Dr Basil Balme, then newly appointed to the university. His PhD research at Cambridge – supervised by Dr Norman Hughes – was undertaken during the tenure of a Robert & Maude Gledden Research Fellowship awarded by UWA. Subsequently, during tenure of a National Research Council of Canada Postdoctoral Fellowship, he worked with Dr Peter Hacquebard and Sedley Barss at the Geological Survey of Canada (Ottawa), followed by a lectureship appointment at UQ. During periods of sabbatical leave from UQ, he has conducted collaborative research, notably with the late Dr Francine Martin (Belgium); the late Dr Colin McGregor (Canada); Prof. Reed Wicander and Merrell Miller (USA); the late Prof. Marco Tongiorgi (Italy); Drs Felipe González and Carmen Moreno (Spain); and, in Brazil, with Drs Rodolfo Dino and José Henrique Gonçalves de Melo, at the Petrobras Research Centre in Rio de Janeiro and the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). He has published extensively on a diverse range of Paleozoic–Cenozoic palynomorphs, with main emphasis on their stratigraphic applications.