Foraminifera test
Shell of a particular type of protist
Foraminiferal tests are the tests (or shells) of Foraminifera.
Foraminifera (forams for short) are single-celled predatory protists, mostly marine, and usually protected with shells. These shells, often called tests, can be single-chambered or have multiple interconnected chambers; the cellular machinery is contained within the shell. So important is the test to the biology of foraminifera that it provides the scientific name of the group—foraminifera, Latin for "hole bearers", referring to the pores connecting chambers of the shell in the multi-chambered species.
Foraminiferal tests are usually made of calcite, a form of calcium carbonate (CaCO3), but are sometimes made of aragonite, agglutinated sediment particles, chitin, or (rarely) of silica. Other foraminifera lack tests altogether.
Over 50,000 species are recognized, both living (6,700 - 10,000) and fossil (40,000). They are usually less than 1 mm in size, but some are much larger, the largest species reaching up to 20 cm. Most forams are benthic, but about 40 extant species are planktonic. The hard nature of most foraminiferal tests leads to an excellent fossil record, and they are widely researched to infer information about past climate and environments.
The public source identifies “Foraminifera test” as shell of a particular type of protist. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Foraminifera, test and Shell.
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This entry incorporates text from “Foraminifera test” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.