Dear Saúl González-Lemos and Heather M. Stoll,

First of all I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer, X. Jin and S.A. Linge Johnsen for the lively discussion and you for your thorough reply. If the manuscript is adapted according to your reply to the comments I think it should be eligible for publication in Biogeosciences, I am looking forward to the revised version of your manuscript.

Best regards,

Marcel

Dear Saul Gonzales-Lemos and heather M. Stoll,

Thank you for make the changes to your manuscript, I think it reads quite well. I do want to ask you to carefully go through the manuscript again, there are a few thinks I find confusing or at least inconsistent. For example, the use of microns and µm and r2 values as just positive or negative values (page 8). I also think that “the “ is missing in some occasions such as the Flores and Sierro method (page 9), even better might be the method developed or used by, or the “color transformer” plugin (page 70) and the user can (line 22 page 2). Then there seems to be a style issue, I am not a big fan of we do this and we do that (sections 4 and 5), but at least try to avoid mixing it with we have done this or that. Other than these minor style and text issues I think one of the main problems is the relatively large number of figures and graphs (9) and two tables. Please consider reducing this number. I think this manuscript would make an interesting contribution to Biogeosciences after these issues have been dealt with.

Specific comments:

Page 3, line 14-16: The sentence starting with “The grayscale” is difficult to follow, it seems a bit circular. Perhaps this can be rewritten more clearly?
Page 9, line 30: thickness in some parts of coccoliths from the Oligocene or coccolith thickness from some parts of the Oligocene?