Raymond Casey, FRS, FGS (10 October 1917 – 26 April 2016) was a British geologist.

Life

He was born in Folkestone, Kent and educated at St. Mary’s Higher Grade Boys School, Folkestone. After war service as aircrew in the RAF he worked with the

Geological Survey A geological survey is the systematic investigation of the geology beneath a given piece of ground for the purpose of creating a geological map or model. Geological surveying employs techniques from the traditional walk-over survey, studying outc ...

, where he researched Palaeozoic stratigraphy. In the mid-1950s he did a PhD course at

Reading University The University of Reading is a public university in Reading, Berkshire, England. It was founded in 1892 as University College, Reading, a University of Oxford extension college. The institution received the power to grant its own degrees in 192 ...

involving a study of the Lower Greensand deposits.http://www.mfms.org.uk/pages/pdf/CASEY%20STORY.pdf In 1970 he was elected a

Fellow of the Royal Society Fellowship of the Royal Society (FRS, ForMemRS and HonFRS) is an award granted by the judges of the Royal Society of London to individuals who have made a "substantial contribution to the improvement of natural knowledge, including mathemat ...

, his election citation describing him as

An authority in a wide field of Mesozoic stratigraphy and palaeontology. His field observations and palaeontological discoveries have clarified depositional history and structural relationships of the English Lower Cretaceous, notably the Lower Greensand. His work on the ammonites has revised correlation in many parts of the globe, notably southeast U.S.A., and has fundamentally modified ideas on stratigraphy and palaeogeography at the Jurassic-Cretaceous boundary in northern Europe. He has elucidated the hinge-structures of many heterodont bivalves and shown that these structures have practical use in subdividing the Purbeck-Wealden series.

He retired from the Geological Survey in 1979, but in 1994 joined the British Museum as an Honorary Research Fellow in order to continue his studies of the Lower Greensand, his particular lifelong interest. His other interest was philately, especially Russian; he was president of the British Society of Russian Philately and a Fellow of the

Royal Philatelic Society The Royal Philatelic Society London (RPSL) is the oldest philatelic society in the world. It was founded on 10 April 1869 as ''The Philatelic Society, London''. The society runs a postal museum, the Spear Museum of Philatelic History, at its he ...

. He died in 2016. He had married Norah Pakeman and had 2 sons. His researches on

ammonites Ammonoids are a group of extinct marine mollusc animals in the subclass Ammonoidea of the class Cephalopoda. These molluscs, commonly referred to as ammonites, are more closely related to living coleoids (i.e., octopuses, squid and cuttl ...

had revised previous theories about the rock formations of the Jurassic–Cretaceous boundary in Northern Europe and his studies of hinge structure of shells had helped to define varying climates of past geological periods.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Casey, Raymond 1917 births 2016 deaths Alumni of the University of Reading British geologists Fellows of the Royal Society