Cor Drooger was born in the Dutch naval town of Den Helder in 1923. When he left secondary school, the Netherlands was under Nazi occupation, and he was apparently of the wrong age and of unsuitable motivation to be allowed to study at any university in his homeland. Finally, at the end of 1945, he enlisted as a student in Utrecht State University, from which he graduated as a geologist in 1949. Drooger did not have to wait long for a job, because an explosive development was underway at Dutch universities in the immediate postwar period. About a year before graduation, Drooger became a university assistant; the charge was partly museum duties and partly instruction in paleontology. During the next four decades, he spent several years abroad on various geological assignments, but the University of Utrecht remained his home base until his retirement. In 1960, he was appointed to a newly-created chair in micropaleontology. For the last twenty years of his official career, he was Professor of Stratigraphy and Paleontology and Chairman of the Department.

During his early years on the Utrecht faculty, when teaching, supervision of students, and administrative duties consumed less time, his publications related to several field projects in North Africa and the West Indies, some of these resulting from consulting projects. A longer paper from this period (1950s) with J. P. H. Kaasschieter involved the distribution of Recent foraminifers on the Orinoco-Trinidad-Paria shelf. This was one of the earliest quantitative studies done anywhere on the distribution of foraminiferal species.

The nineteen-fifties were also a very productive time for chronostratigraphic applications of micropaleontology in Europe. Several workers felt it necessary to obtain a better microfossil inventory of the type sections and type areas of the classical Tertiary stages. Drooger, with some younger colleagues, completed a very useful study of the lower Tertiary stages of Belgium, and then went on, with the help of Dutch and foreign colleagues (including A. Papp and C. Socin), to conduct research on many younger stages. The best-known publication in this series is probably a 1955 paper with J. P. H. Kaasschieter and A. J. Keij on the faunas of the typical Aquitanian and Burdigalian of southwestem France.

Drooger has written over a hundred research papers, but if there is one topic with which we should immediately associate his name, that would be the taxonomy, stratigraphy, and evolution of miogypsinids. His fascination with these unusual Oligo-Miocene larger foraminifers has been virtually lifelong and it started with a consulting job in 1950 when he came in contact with the miogypsinids of central America. Building on the pioneering work of Tan Sin Hok in the 1930s, Drooger's goal was to unravel the evolutionary development of the nepionic stage in this family. From the very beginning, his emphasis was on quantitative aspects of internal morphology, and he had to design suitable parameters for expressing the characters of the embryonicnepionic apparatus. His species concept, in essence, was based on the central tendency of representative populations. His 1952 thesis on American miogypsinids is a milestone in the study of larger foraminifers. It was the first attempt of lineage reconstruction with morphometric methods and the concept of nepionic acceleration. Some of these early conclusions were tentative, but they were confirmed by many subsequent studies. Drooger's lineage-segment species with clearly defined morphometric limits proved to be very useful in solving stratigraphic problems, for instance, in finally settling the argument on the correlation of lower Miocene strata of southwestern France and northern Italy.

In later years, his own research and that of his many followers on Mediterranean and Far Eastern miogypsinids, all using the same methods, led to the reconstruction of a fairly complex family tree and to the recognition that the group represents one of the fastest evolving clades known in the world-wide fossil record. The average species longevity within the genus Miogypsina, for example, was on the order of one million years.

The morphometric methods introduced by Drooger have been successfully employed on several other groups of complex foraminifera by other taxonomists, in Utrecht and elsewhere. These studies have shown that there is remarkable parallelism in the development of embryonic and nepionic chambers in many unrelated lineages. Between 1956 and 1984, Drooger published several papers on the evolutionary meaning of this parallelism. Using the basic techniques of Drooger, some of his students and younger colleagues at Utrecht have looked closely at morphometric changes over extremely short stratigraphic distances, on the scale of several thousand years, rather than several million years. These results on the lineages of Planorbulinella, Miogypsina, Orbitoides, and Cycloclypeus have shown a striking range of variation in evolutionary patterns. This line of research, especially when the roles of environment and those of vital processes are also taken into account, appears very promising for testing, and placing constraints on, evolutionary theories.

Drooger has made the University of Utrecht a remarkable center of education and research in micropaleontology. The best evidence of the productivity of this center is its wellknown publication, the Utrecht Micropaleontological Bulletins. Since 1969, 41 monographs, most of them based on Ph.D. research, have been published in this series. From the inception of the series, Drooger's aim has been to provide the paleontological community with the results of research at Utrecht at a reasonable price. So, for many years, he had to manage the Bulletins both editorially and fiscally. It helped that Mrs. Drooger agreed to be in charge of sales.

Drooger has had a steady stream of enthusiastic students. Over forty of them wrote their Ph.D. dissertations on diverse aspects of foraminiferal paleontology. Drooger's former students are scattered all over the world, but some have taken up the task of keeping the Utrecht School alive and well.

To sum it up, Cornelis Drooger has been one of the most respected micropaleontologists of postwar Europe. His influence has reached far and wide, especially in the field of larger foraminiferal research. He is still busy working on unsolved problems, and we expect many more thought-provoking papers from him. Meanwhile, it is with great pleasure and professional pride that the Cushman Foundation gives him its token of appreciation - the 1991 Cushman Award for Excellence in Foraminiferal Research.

G. J. VAN DER ZWAAN
Department of Geology
University of Utrecht

BARUN K. SEN GUPTA
Department of Geology and Geophysics
Louisiana State University

Journal of Foraminiferal Research, v. 22, no. 3, p. 193-194, July 1992