{"id":487185,"date":"2023-08-15T16:40:09","date_gmt":"2023-08-15T19:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=487185"},"modified":"2023-08-15T16:40:09","modified_gmt":"2023-08-15T19:40:09","slug":"a-naturalist-among-geologists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/a-naturalist-among-geologists\/","title":{"rendered":"A naturalist among geologists"},"content":{"rendered":"
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L\u00e9o Ramos Chaves \/ Revista Pesquisa FAPESP<\/span>Petri in February this yearL\u00e9o Ramos Chaves \/ Revista Pesquisa FAPESP<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Geologist Ana Maria G\u00f3es, from the Geosciences Institute of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (IGC-USP), recalls that Setembrino Petri never rested on his laurels: \u201cUp to the age of 90, he was still going out doing fieldwork.\u201d After officially retiring in 1985, he taught at the IGC for another 10 years and continued mentoring students until shortly before he died on March 1, at the age of 100. With a diverse personal and professional background, he emphasized that he was a naturalist, not a geologist.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe way a naturalist and a geologist think is different,\u201d he once said in an interview with Pesquisa<\/em> FAPESP<\/em>. \u201cNaturalists look at nature from a wide perspective, organizing knowledge by integrating various simultaneously contemplated subjects. Geologists start their observation of an event based on a question circumscribed by the scope of their work, completing or remodeling a body of previous knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born in Amparo, Petri enrolled on the natural history course at what was then USP\u2019s School of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters (FFCL) in 1942 \u2014 there was no geology course in S\u00e3o Paulo at that time. \u201cThe tense atmosphere at the end of the Second World War colored our day-to-day lives with an aura of concern, raising profound unknowns about the future; we were occupied by a sense of responsibility, perhaps too heavy for our age,” he wrote in the book Cr\u00f4nicas da paleontologia brasileira <\/em>(Chronicles of Brazilian paleontology), organized by Rafael Delcourt and Renato Pirani Ghilardi (Letra1, 2022).<\/p>\n

After graduating in 1944, Petri spent almost a year at the S\u00e3o Paulo Geographic and Geological Institute, before starting a PhD in natural history at USP in 1945. For his doctorate, completed in 1948, he studied marine fossils from Paran\u00e1 aged 419 million to 370 million years old, presenting a new approach called stratigraphic paleontology, which associates fossils with the geological layers where they were found.<\/p>\n

He became interested in microfossils \u2014 the skeletal remains of microscopic organisms, from thousandths of a millimeter to a few centimeters in length \u2014 when Ant\u00f4nio Rocha Penteado, a colleague from the Geography Department at FFCL, gave him some samples of limestone from Par\u00e1. They contained many microfossils of single-celled marine organisms known as foraminifera.<\/p>\n

To study them, he successfully applied for a fellowship at the Cushman Laboratory of Foraminiferal Research (now the Cushman Foundation of Foraminiferal Research) in the USA. He was there when the directors of the National Petroleum Council (CNP) invited him to study fossils collected from oil drilling areas. Petri left USP in 1950 to work with the CNP in Bel\u00e9m, where he set up Brazil\u2019s first micropaleontology laboratory. In 1954, when the CNP became Petrobras, he returned to USP.<\/p>\n

At the IGC, Petri drew paleogeographic maps showing the distribution of marine animals along the Brazilian coast millions of years ago, and described dozens of new foraminifera species. The most recent description, of a species from the Antarctic peninsula aged between 22 million and 11 million years old, was presented in a Journal of Paleontology <\/em>article in January 2022. He argued that microfossils were abundant and extremely useful for dating rock formations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Setembrino Petri showed how microfossils can retell the history of natural landscapes","protected":false},"author":17,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1348],"tags":[240,255],"coauthors":[5968],"class_list":["post-487185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-obituary","tag-geology","tag-paleontology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/17"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=487185"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487185\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":487191,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/487185\/revisions\/487191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=487185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=487185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=487185"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=487185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}