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Basin to subside to about 600 m water depth. This basin then became filled in as the rocks of the Northern Range were eroded and transported into it. Some forams especially Pseudononion and Ammonia live near river mouths and so can be used to determine when and where rivers have impacted an area. My work has shown that these genera are rare in Trinidad until the latest Miocene about six million years ago when they appear abundantly in the Manzanilla Formation. This marks the diversion of the Orinoco River the worlds fourth largest river towards Trinidad. Prior to the latest Miocene the Orinoco flowed northwards into the Caribbean Sea through Lake Maracaibo. The continued develop- ment of mountain ranges along the Caribbean coast of northern South America blocked this passage diverting the river so that it flowed west to east. As demonstrated by the work outlined above we geologists and palaeontologists have wonderful and enormous yarns to tell of the history of the Earth and the life it supports. Science is concerned with the pursuit of truth however and we Earth scientists must ground our stories in reality just as much as any other scientist. I have in recent years become interested in the impact of personal bias on the making of interpretations. The ability to reproduce quantitative results is a hallmark of science but not the only one. In addition any scientist who subsequently re-examines somebodys original research must be able to repro- duce the interpretation of those results. Confidence in scientific research is undermined when an interpretation cannot be confirmed.This will happen when an a priori before investigation assumption was introduced by the original author even inadvert- entlyregarding the nature of the universe or a subset of it.Such an assumption is termed an ontological assumption when it is treated as invariant that is it is not changed as unsupportive evidence is accumulated. It thus conditions the interpretation of any observed scientific phenomena. The results of the scientific investigation are therefore interpreted within the framework of this assumption even though this framework is at variance with actual results obtained. I am currently re-examining early palaeo ecolgical work on Trinidad from the late 1960s and 1970s and showing how the removal of erroneous ontological assumptions can lead to vastly different interpretations of Earth history. Selected Publications Wilson B. Hayek L.C. Ontology confounds reproducibility in ecology and climate science.Life The Excitement of Biology20142 1330. Wilson B. Trouble in Paradise A comparison of 1953 and 2005 benthonic foraminiferal seafloor assemblages at the Ibis Field offshore eastern Trinidad West Indies. Journal of Micropalaeontol- ogy 200625157-164. Wilson B. Effect of hurricanes on guilds of nearshore epiphytal foraminifera Nevis West Indies. Journal of Foraminiferal Research 201040327-343. 91