Alfred L. Wegener is most famous for his theory of continental drift, but among his many accomplishments he also was involved in several key polar expeditions. Early in his career and prior to global fame, Wegener was initiated into Arctic exploration on the 1906–08 Danmark Expedition to the North-East Coast of Greenland. This expedition sought to explore an unmapped area on the northeastern coast of Greenland, collecting geological, paleontological, and ethnological samples en-route. Recently, in the collections of the Natural History Museum Denmark, four drawers of Carboniferous and Permian rocks primarily collected by Wegener during the Danmark Expedition were rediscovered. Amongst this material is a small tube of disaggregated fusulinids, and 36 limestone samples known to contain foraminifera based on previous studies. This paper weaves a narrative of the expedition with the provenance and dates of collection of the foraminifera-bearing samples, and outlines their importance for the foundations of biostratigraphic studies in this vast and remote region.
Bashforth et al. (Sat,) studied this question.