In the mid-1850s, Thomas Henry Huxley, who coined the term ‘coccolith’, described their presence in oceanic sediments dredged from the sea floor. Subsequent recognition of their occurrence in the Upper Cretaceous English Chalk, largely unconsolidated pelagic sediment, and similar, more lithified limestones in the Jurassic of the Alps, led to their being considered major rock-forming elements through much of geological time, although they are now known to be limited to the Late Triassic–Recent interval. Unlike Charles Darwin, who did not travel abroad following the voyage of the Beagle, Huxley made a number of trips to Italy and Switzerland and is recorded as a guest in the exclusive Hotel Kursaal Maloja in the Engadin in 1893. While staying there, he made a number of excursions on foot and his presence was thought significant enough that it is recorded in an inscribed granitic stone tablet, erected in 1896, describing him as’the illustrious writer and naturalist’. His rambles would have led him past outcrops of tectonically emplaced true oceanic calcareous sediment of Early Cretaceous age, here shown to have originally contained coccoliths that were largely destroyed under the imprint of Alpine metamorphism of sub-greenschist to greenschist facies. To this extent, Huxley could have come close to recognizing true oceanic sediments exposed on land, but the dissimilarity between these Swiss Alpine deposits and the friable English Chalk would not obviously have led to the investigation of the former for the organisms he had christened as ‘coccoliths’.

1850 年代中期，托马斯·亨利·赫胥黎 (Thomas Henry Huxley) 创造了“颗石石”一词，描述了它们存在于从海底挖出的海洋沉积物中。随后人们认识到它们出现在白垩纪上层的英国白垩岩中，主要是松散的远洋沉积物，以及阿尔卑斯山侏罗纪的类似的、更石化的石灰岩，导致它们在大部分地质时期被认为是主要的造岩元素，尽管它们现在已经被认为是主要的造岩元素。已知仅限于晚三叠世-近近时期。与查尔斯·达尔文不同，他在小猎犬号航行后没有出国旅行赫胥黎曾多次前往意大利和瑞士，并据记载于 1893 年作为客人入住了位于恩加丁地区的库尔萨尔马洛亚酒店 (Kursaal Maloja)。 住在那里期间，他进行了多次步行游览，人们认为他的存在意义重大，以至于1896 年竖立的花岗岩石碑上记载了他的事迹，称他为“杰出的作家和博物学家”。他的闲逛会引导他经过早白垩世时期构造上真正的海洋钙质沉积物的露头，这里显示最初含有一颗颗石，这些颗石在亚绿片岩到绿片岩相的阿尔卑斯变质作用的印记下大部分被破坏。从这个意义上说，赫胥黎可能已经接近认识到暴露在陆地上的真正的海洋沉积物，