“…Ostracods have been comparatively less studied in the Indian Ocean than in other oceans around the world. Most Indian Ocean studies focus on modern shallow to bathyal marine faunas along the Indian coast in the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea (Jain, 1981;Hussain, 1998;Sridhar et al, 2002;Hussain et al, 2004Hussain et al, , 2007Gopalakrishna et al, 2007Gopalakrishna et al, , 2008Mostafawi et al, 2010;Munef et al, 2012;Iwatani et al, 2014;Nishath et al, 2015Nishath et al, , 2017, from the Persian Gulf to the Mozambique channel (Maddocks, 1966(Maddocks, , 1969a(Maddocks, , 1969bBonaduce et al, 1976Bonaduce et al, , 1980Malz and Jellinek, 1989;Jellinek, 1993;Babinot and Kouyoumontzakis, 1995;Mostafawi, 2003;, and from the Malaysia-Indonesia region (Kingma, 1948;Whatley andZhao, 1987, 1988;Dewi, 1993;Zhao and Whatley, 1997;Mostafawi et al, 2005;Fauzielly et al, 2013;Iwatani et al, 2018;Shin et al, 2019). Only a few regional stratigraphic studies on late Cenozoic ostracods have been published to date (Benson, 1974;Guernet, 1993;Yasuhara et al, 2017;Shin et al, 2019), and even fewer have been published from the Maldives.…”