Ivan de Klasz was born in Hungary in 1926. Soon after his secondary school graduation he had to leave his country, then occupied by the U.S.S.R. Red Army. First he survived with his brother in postwar Germany. During part of this time he worked as a courier for a Vatican delegation for Hungarian refugees, distributing mail coming from the occupied country as well as material aid from care-giving organizations. He helped his brother secure a diploma in architectural engineering at the Munich Technical University, after which they both moved to France. After formalities for a residence permit were fulfilled, his brother found a job in Paris while I.K. registered at the Paris School of Mines as a "free student" because full admission required a minimum of two years post-secondary school studies. After he successfully finished his first year, he returned to Germany because the "free student" status did not allow him to obtain a mining engineering diploma. At the University of Munich he was admitted to second year studies in the Geology Department on the condition that at the end of the year he passed both the first and second year examinations in German. It was a year of hard work, finally crowned by success, and some years later in Dec. 1953, he obtained a doctor's degree in geology. His doctor's thesis was stratigraphically-oriented, but micropaleontology played an important role in solving problems of an extremely complicated Alpine geology. An abridged version was later incorporated into the regional geologic map and accompanying explanatory text. While still a graduate student, he published his first three papers describing a number of new foraminiferal species and one new genus (some of which have been found ever since in widely scattered areas of the world).

About one month after obtaining his doctor's degree he obtained a job as a micropaleontologist with a common subsidiary of Shell and Esso in Germany (Gewerkschaft Brigitta). However, a few weeks later another job offer came from a French oil company pool which was later to become Elf-Aquitaine. I.K. was invited to work as a biostratigrapher in Gabon, then part of French Equatorial Africa. Two and a half months later he was actually in Africa (April 1954), with his personal 1948 edition of Cushman's Foraminifera volume as sole micropaleontological documentation. The day after his arrival he appointed the first Gabonese technician to be trained in micropaleontology. Because local faunas were mostly new to him, work in the beginning was not easy, but fortunately the documentation dispatched by him prior to his departure to Africa started to arrive.

But in those early times no "planktonic scale" existed - the famous "Bulletin 211" of the Smithsonian Institution with the classic papers by Loeblich and Tappan, Bolli, Beckman, and others, was to appear only some years later. Thus, an empirical local biostratigraphic scale had to be worked out. In addition, administrative duties took up a lot of time, and all the drilling rig lab. Technicians had to be hired and trained by the local central lab. When in 1956 oil was found in commercial quantity in the basin, a hectic period followed, especially as exploration was expanded to the Cameroon and Congo basins. Staff increased as new rigs arrived, particularly when activity was spurred by the 1956 "Suez crisis." However, after this crisis was gone it was realized that, though important, none of the African basins turned into new "Saudi Arabias." Organized activity therefore leveled off, even though it remained rather lively, especially when off-shore drilling began in the very early 1960s. The "first edition" of an iconographic atlas of index foraminifera was finished by I. de Klasz and D. Rêat with very primitive resources then available. It was nevertheless accurate, and some 20 years later, when a new edition with SEM pictures was issued by Elf-Aquitaine's central lab in 1983, illustrated index species and their stratigraphic ranges were still essentially the same. West Africa is quite distinct biogeographically with its numerous endemic microfaunas, and hence, a considerable number of new genera and new species were described by I.K. and collaborators.

Even after a biostratigraphic scale of the marine sequence had been set up, work was by no means uneventful. The beginning of off-shore drilling led to the discovery of considerable oil reserves in non-marine, Lower Cretaceous, pre-salt deposits. For this reason, research was re-oriented, and an ostracode-palynomorph scale became necessary. During early phases of this period the cooperation with PETROBRAS was of great help as the Brazilian company had already established such a scale, and Lower Cretaceous, non-marine ostracode faunas on both sides of the Atlantic display an amazing similarity. When oil exploration declined in some West African basins (e.g. Senegal and Ivory Coast), in an effort to avoid the loss of all the data collected, I.K. proposed to French authorities the organization of an international colloquium on African micropaleontology. In 1963 a most successful meeting was held in Dakar (Senegal) under the sponsorship of the University of Dakar, the local Geological Survey and oil companies. L.S. Senghor, then president of Senegal, opened the colloquium. Since then, twelve more colloquia have followed, resulting in the publication of some 6,000 printed pages of geologic information. The next meeting is planned for the year 2000 in Luanda, Angola.

For his professional and training activities I.K. was named knight of the Equatorial Star Order of Gabon in 1965 and promoted to "officer's grade" in the same order. In September 1972 he joined the Southern Oil Exploration Corporation (SOEKOR) in Johannesburg, South Africa. He was most welcome, and still nowadays he maintains occasional contact with some South African colleagues and friends from that time. Also the work was challenging and involved the setup of a new stratigraphical laboratory and establishment of a local stratigraphic scale with a radically new and different fauna.

In October 1973, I.K. accepted a professorship at the University of Ife in Nigeria. Soon after his arrival he started a service of geological consultancy within the geology department. This went on successfully for years, while oil exploration was very active and funds aplenty as a consequence of high oil prices.

Also, the French Embassy in Nigeria accepted his suggestion of extending the French governmental "technical assistance program" to the technical domain as well as to the cultural one. This allowed the recruiting of much needed staffs of specialists not found locally for the University. For his activity in the field of technical assistance to the French Embassy he was designated knight of the French National Order of Merit. In addition to teaching various courses he also supervised a number of honours and m.sc. theses and co-supervised doctoral theses of Nigerian students at French universities.

After spending six years in Ife I.K. was offered the headship of the Geology Department of the newly founded University of Jos. Housed in temporary buildings, the department's beginnings were modest. However, the department finally received a definitive building with lecture rooms, a laboratory partly donated by France and some French staff members. About one year later I.K. left Jos University for the University of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to work as an agent of the French technical assistance program. During his stay in Nigeria he also worked as external examiner for various universities.

In Ivory Coast, while there was an established geology department, documentation in the field of paleontology and especially micropaleontology was insufficient. From technical assistance funds and tough negotiations with the German, Dutch and Spanish Embassies as well as with funds earned from biostratigraphic consultancy fees, a reasonable documentation plus French and German optical equipment could be acquired on his own initiative. In addition, postgraduate study possibilities could be secured for local students at French Universities. When he decided to retire a year and a half before reaching the age limit, he was made knight of the Ivory Coast Order of Merit.

After his retirement in October 1988 he continued his foraminiferal research at home in Nice, France at the side of his wife, Sandrine, also a micropaleontogist. He also participated in the supervision of post-graduate students from various African countries (Ivory Coast, Benin, Congo) preparing doctor's theses at the Dijon University in France. Through intervention of his German friends, considerable material assistance from Germany was obtained for Dakar University in Senegal, as well as research periods for Senegalese colleagues at German universities.

From 1954 to 1988 Ivan de Klasz worked as the leading foraminiferal biostratigrapher in Africa. He pioneered the first biostratigraphic schemes for Meso-Cenozoic successions in West African marginal basins, still in use, which are based both on planktonic and benthic foraminiferal assemblages, including many new genera and species. He has an extensive list of scientific publications (74 plus papers starting in 1953) on foraminifer stratigraphy, taxonomy and paleogeography. Ivan participated in the organisation of 12 African Micropaleontological Colloquia as initiator and vice-president, co-president or secretary. He was also co-leader of the International Geological Correlation Programme (IGCP) Project no. 145 (Biostratigraphie Ouest-Africaine et ses Correlations), member of IGCP Project 57 (Mid-Cretaceous Events), and regional coordinator of IGCP Projects 174 (Terminal Eocene Events), 183 (Western African Mesozoic and Cenozoic Correlation), and 381 (South Atlantic Mesozoic Correlations).

He is coeditor of the volume "Geologie de l'Afrique et de l'Atlantique Sud" (Proc. of the 1994 Angers Colloquia), member of the Scientific Committee of the Revue de Micropaleontologie and works as occasional reviewer for various scientific journals, such as the Journal of African Earth Sciences, Cretaceous Research, African Geosciences Review and the Bulletin Elf-Aquitaine.

The Board of Directors of the Cushman Foundation for Foraminiferal Research is honored to present the 1998 Cushman Award to Ivan de Klasz in recognition of his lifetime contributions to applied micropaleontology and his pioneering foraminiferal research in West Africa. In the words of our late colleague and dearest friend, W. V. Sliter, "Ivan de Klasz was a pioneer in foraminiferal research for West Africa, following the very footsteps of J.A. Cushman's tradition".

Priv.-Doz. Dr. Eduardo A. M. Koutsoukos
PETROBRAS-CENPES/DIVEX/SEBIPE
Cidade Universitdria

Journal of Foraminiferal Research, v. 29, no. 1, p.1-3, January 1999