Raphaël Conil

Raphaël Conil (born July 5, 1930 in Brugelette , † July 7, 1990 in Hamme-Mille ) was a Belgian geologist and paleontologist .

Conil attended the college of Ath , where he became interested in palaeontology from the Abbé Albert Delcourt, a pollen researcher with whom he later published. In 1954 he graduated from the Catholic University of Leuven with a degree in geology and paleontology, where he received his doctorate from Etienne Asselberghs in 1957 on the stratigraphy of Dinantium north of the Namur basin (in the area from Dendre to Orneau). From 1957 to 1960 he was a scientist at the Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS) and in 1962 he became head of the Laboratory for Micropaleontology at Petrofina, after completing an internship in micropaleontology with Maurice Lys at the French Petroleum Institute in 1961. In 1963 he became a lecturer (Chargé de Cours), 1969 associate professor and 1971 professor at the Catholic University of Leuven (as the successor to his mentor Marius Lecompte). He mainly taught paleontology of invertebrates and micropalaeontology . Among other things, he was visiting professor at the University of Liège and the State University of New York at Brockport .

He conducted research worldwide in Great Britain, Germany (where he worked with Eva Paproth , for example ), France, Spain, Norway, Sweden, Turkey, the USA, Mexico, Iran, China and Russia including Siberia. He was a member of Devon - Carbon Working Group of the International Union of Geological Sciences and the Commission was for the stratigraphy of the Dinantiums ago.

He wrote 124 scientific papers. He first investigated the use of foraminifera and later conodonts for stratigraphy and developed new methods of examining microfossils in hard rock strata, where they had previously been less considered. In the 1960s he worked with Maurice Lys on microfossils of Dinantium and with Henri Pirlet (University of Liège) on the stratigraphy of Dinantium in Belgium. With Pirlet and Eric Groessens, he published a stratigraphic classification of carbon in Belgium in 1977 and the stages Hastarium , Ivorium , Warnantium , Livium , Moliniacium proposed by them were later adopted internationally in stratigraphy. Other employees were Maurice Streel and Jos Bouckaert.

In 1984 he became a corresponding member of the Paleontological Society and in 1987 a member of the Royal Belgian Academy of Sciences . In 1965 and 1990 he received the Prix Adolphe Wetrems of the Belgian Academy of Sciences and posthumously he received the André Dumont Prize of the Belgian Geological Society.

Web links

• André Delmer, Luc Hance: Raphael Conil , obituary at the Belgian Academy of Sciences, Annuaire Académie Royale de Belgique 1992, pdf
• biography