Highly magnified fossil foraminifera as seen in thin-section
Alcide d’Orbigny
Alcide d’Orbigny was a remarakable prolific and pioneering zoologist, paleontologist,
geologist and anthropologist. It was he who first recognised foraminifera as a biological
entity and understood their stratigraphic application. As a geologist, he introduced the
concept of stages, the now standard means of chronostratigraphic subdivision. Moreover,
he related these stages to global events – “the expression of the boundaries which Nature
has drawn with bold strokes across the whole globe” – immediately bringing to mind
modern day concepts of eustatically-driven sequence stratigraphy. But these subjects
represent only a small part of d’Orbigny’s scientific activity. Several years ahead of Darwin,
he undertook a major eight year expedition of South America focused on describing
the plants, animals and native people he encountered. On his return, he set about
developing an atlas of all invertebrate fossils encountered in his native France, along with
their associated geology. Sadly, he died at the relatively young age of 55, but not before
publishing fundamental works on all his research themes.
d’Orbigny was born in 1802 in the town of Couëron, close to the Loire River, west of
Nantes, his family then moving to the coastal village of Esnandes near La Rochelle in 1815