ORIGINAL PAPER Palynomorph biostratigraphy of the Cretaceous (Hauterivian–lower Cenomanian) of the South Sallum Well, North Western Desert, Egypt Sameh S. Tahoun & Tarek F. Mostafa & Walid A. Makled & Rehab A. Saleh Received: 29 November 2014 /Accepted: 24 February 2015 # Saudi Society for Geosciences 2015 Abstract A palynological analysis has been carried out on the lower–middle Cretaceous rock units encountered in the subsurface section of the South Sallum well, north Western Desert of Egypt. Eighty-three ditch cutting sam- ples have been analyzed palynologically and produced 71 species belonging to 49 genera, which allow recognizing ten informal sporomorph zones restricted to northern Western Desert ranging from early Cenomanian to Hauterivian. The erected palynozones are not only appli- cable to the western part of the Western Desert, but valid to the north Western Desert as well. They are correlated with well-documented zonations established for the same interval from other localities in the north Western Desert of Egypt and outside in north Africa. Keywords Cretaceous . Hauterivian–early Cenomanian . Palynostratigraphy . Palynomorphs . Alam El-Bueib . Alamain . Dahab . Kharita . Bahariya . WesternDesert . Egypt Introduction The Western Desert is considered as the main sedimen- tary basin in Egypt since the Paleozoic Era (Hantar 1990). Practically, many papers have been issued on the palynological characteristics of the Creatceous stages in north Western Desert (e.g., Aboul Ela and Tahoun 2010 ; El Beialy et al. 2010 , 2011 ; Tahoun 2012 ; Tahoun et al. 2012 , 2013 ; Tahoun and Mohamed 2013; Makled and Baioumi 2013; Makled et al. 2013; Zobaa et al. 2013; Deaf et al. 2014). Owing to the considerable abundance, diversity, and fair to good pres- ervation of the palynomorphs in Cretaceous sediments, they are previously and extensively used for dating the Cretaceous sediments and differentiating between their stages. In the same stratigraphic horizons, a remarkable variation in the horizontal extension of some recovered taxa is reported. This may be attributed to the minor ecologic changes within the Western Desert basins and also to the lateral sedimentological variation characteriz- ing the area (Hantar 1990; Kerdany and Cherif 1990). Facies control may have influenced the dinoflagellate cyst assemblages, making them inter-regionally variable in composition (Poulsen and Riding 2003). Although there are many publications dealing with the Cretaceous palynology of the Western Desert, none of them is concerned with the extreme western part of the Western Desert basin close to the Egyptian–Libyan boundary ex- cept further south at Foram-1 well (Srivastava 1984). Hence, this work aims to present a new valuable infor- mation about the characteristic Cretaceous (Hauterivian– lower Cenomanian) palynomorphs of the Sallum area in the western part of the Western Desert basin that have not been investigated before. It also aims to erecting and establishing an early–middle Cretaceous palynostratigraphic zonation scheme for this part of the Western Desert and to correlate such proposed palynozones herein with those previously suggested by many authors inside and outside Egypt. S. S. Tahoun (*) Geology Department, Faculty of Science, Cairo University, P.O. Box 12613, Giza, Egypt e-mail: stahoun@yahoo.com T. F. Mostafa : W. A. Makled : R. A. Saleh Department of Exploration, Egyptian Petroleum Research Institute, 1 Ahmed El-Zomor Street, El-Zohour Region, Nasr City, Cairo, Postal Code 11727, Egypt Arab J Geosci DOI 10.1007/s12517-015-1861-0