Aretz et al_2011.pdf - ORBi - Université de Liège

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Kölner Forum Geol. Paläont., 19 (2011)
M. ARETZ, S. DELCULÉE, J. DENAYER & E. POTY (Eds.)
Abstracts, 11th Symposium on Fossil Cnidaria and Sponges, Liège, August 19-29, 2011
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Marius LECOMPTE, Professor and student of Stromatoporida, Tabulata,
and Devonian reefs
160
James E. SORAUF
25 Susanna Drive, Durham, North Carolina 27705, USA; jsorauf@binghamton.edu
Marius LECOMPTE died on August 21, 1970, at the age of 68. He was born on May 16, 1902, in
Morlanwelz, Belgium. His family had originated in the small town of Binches, in southwestern Belgium
(UBAGHS 1977). Thus, he was a true Walloon in origin, and indirectly, from Binches, the famous carnival
town. He probably grew up enjoying a party, but coming from a family of modest means, he also knew the
value of hard work in the effort to get ahead in the world. Thus, M. LECOMPTE was a prodigious worker,
but also one who instigated the parties in Louvain to celebrate the feast day of Ste. Barbara (the patronness
of miners, quarrymen, and geologists). M. LECOMPTE began his career as a student of the classics and was at
the top of his school class. His first teaching position was in 1924 in a high school in Chimay, where he
taught the natural sciences (UGBAGHS 1977). It may be here that he learned to enjoy the beer of the Trappist
monks. When the Louvain group went into the field each week in 1960-61, the day was always finished
with several Trappistes de Chimay at Phillipeville, on our way back to Genval, the home of the Lecomptes.
As a new young graduate of the Catholic University of Louvain, geologist Marius Lecompte went to
Katanga, the copper-rich province of the Congo in 1927, directly after gaining his baccalaureate. On the
money he saved from this work, he married, Raymonde LEURQUIN in 1930 and enrolled as a doctoral
student at the University of Louvain. Madame LECOMPTE was a very gracious hostess and known as such to
all of M. LECOMPTE'S advanced students and to professional visitors. Additionally, each morning during my
stay (academic year 1960-61), she telephoned to the laboratory when M. LECOMPTE left home so that he
could be met at the front door of the institute by his two preparators at Louvain. Claude drove his car to
find a parking place and Raoul carried his heavy briefcase up to the laboratory.
M. LECOMPTE began his paleontological career in 1933, mentored by Achille SALÉE in Louvain, and
working with Eugene MAILLEUX at the Royal Museum of Natural History in Brussels beginning in 1934. At
the museum, he rose through numerous intermediate stages to Director of the Paleontology Laboratory in
1952. During the 1930s, Lecompte traveled throughout Europe and the U.S., and spent several months at
the Carnegie Institution of Washington research laboratory in the Dry Tortugas of Florida. His career at the
University of Louvain began in 1945 when he was named instructor and he rose to Professor in 1949. It was
during this period that LECOMPTE produced his classic monographs on the tabulate corals and
stromatoporoid sponges of the Middle and Upper Devonian of Belgium, and his contributions of sections
on the stromatoporoids, tabulates and rugosans to the French Traite de Palèontologie edited by J. PIVETEAU,
and wrote the section on the Stromatoporoidea for Volume F of the Treatise on Paleontology (1956), edited
by R. C. MOORE. At the same time, he was focusing more on Devonian stratigraphy and paleoecology
through field studies in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s.
The contributions of LECOMPTE were multiple; first, his systematic work on the Tabulata and
Stromatoporida, culminating in the monographs published by the Royal Museum of Natural History.
Following publication of this set of 4 monographs and his writing sections for the Traite (1952) and the
Treatise on Paleontology (1954), M. LECOMPTE focused more on unraveling the facies relationships and
stratigraphy of the Devonian of the Ardennes, work that began on bicycle during World War II. It was at
this time that he developed and refined his methods for correlation by understanding the paleobathymetry
of the Devonian strata, in main part as reflected by their coral and stromatoporoid faunas. This allowed
him to develop correlations between outcrops within the Dinant Basin and extend them to the Namur
Basin (Fig. 1), with these correlations based overwhelmingly on cycles of bathimetric change indicated
specially by colony shapes and types of fauna, reflected in the development of reefal and near-reef
carbonates. In the Ardennes, these occur in Devonian strata that were deposited in marginal, subsiding
shelf areas, thus characterized by large bioherms, while areas of lesser subsidence were characterized by
'I