Abstract The Grand Banks of Newfoundland is a broad continental shelf that extends 450 km into the North Atlantic Ocean. A sequence of Mesozoic rift-events and subsequent break-ups associated with the North Atlantic rift are recorded in a series of complex basins. From the onset of exploration in the 1960’s, regional exploration on the Grand Banks has been primarily focused on the Early Cretaceous Ben Nevis and Hibernia formations shallow marine sandstone reservoirs. This early phase of exploration resulted in the discovery of the Hibernia, White Rose, and Hebron fields in the southern Jeanne d’Arc Basin. Collectively, these fields contain approximately 2.5 billion barrels of oil resources. The Terra Nova Field in the southern Jeanne d’Arc basin is the exception to this Early Cretaceous play trend, producing from Late Jurassic braided fluvial reservoirs (Jeanne d’Arc Formation) and contains approximately 500 million barrels of oil resources. This presentation is focused on recognizing and delineating a now proven petroleum system in the North Flemish Pass basin.

Inoceramus gradually declined in abundance over a narrow stratigraphie interval of the Maastrichtian Stage and apparently went extinct synchronously across a wide range of depths and facies near the Globotruncana ganserri/Abathomphalus mayaroensis planktonic foram zonal boundary, well before the K/T boundary. This conclusion is based largely on the observed numeric density of prismatic shell fragments of Inoceramus through eight stratigraphie sections. If care is taken to minimize the possibility of contamination through physical and biological reworking, prism density seems to follow Inoceramus density and could be a powerful new biostratigraphic tool.