Microfaunal Assemblages and Biostratigraphic Significance of the Gangeswar Dome, Kachchh Basin, Western India

This conference poster presents the first documented record of Early Cretaceous microfaunal assemblages from the Gangeswar Dome, in the eastern Kachchh (Kutch) Basin of western India. Working from two newly reported lithological layers of the Bhuj Formation, the authors recover benthic and planktonic foraminifera alongside algal remains and echinoderm plates from ferruginous arenaceous sandstone, and use four distinct foraminiferal assemblages to reconstruct the depositional setting as a shallow, well-oxygenated, photic-zone marine environment. The work establishes a new fossil locality and a biostratigraphic and palaeoenvironmental baseline for correlating Early Cretaceous marine incursions across the western Indian margin. The deposit is the poster presented at the 30th Indian Colloquium on Micropaleontology and Stratigraphy (ICMS 2026), IIT Bhubaneswar, and will be of interest to micropalaeontologists, stratigraphers, and basin-analysis and hydrocarbon-exploration researchers working on the Kachchh Basin and Mesozoic western India.