Lower Cambrian acritarchs and the Proterozoic-Cambrian boundary in southern Norway

Acritarchs are reported from Lower Cambrian sections in the area of Lake Mjoesa in southern Norway that previously yielded poor skeletal faunas. These skeletal faunas constitute in part the grounds for the faunal biozonation of the Lower Cambrian in Baltoscandia. Compared with other previously investigated sections in Baltoscandia and Greenland, the Lake Mjoesa sections produced numerically sparse assemblages of acritarchs. Taxonomically, they are readily comparable to assemblages from the platform areas of eastern Europe in the USSR and Poland which establish the basis for previously defined "stages" and acritarch biozones. They can also be compared to assemblages from sequences in the remaining fragments of shelf areas of the early Palaeozoic Iapetus Ocean bordering the present-day North Atlantic (e.g. the Scandinavian Caledonides, Spitsbergen, East and North Greenland, and Scotland).