Cornelie Marguerite Bramine Caudri (1904 – 1991)

The caribbean’s micropaleontologist

Abstract

Cornelie Marguerite Bramine Caudri was a Dutch micropaleontologist born 120 years ago on December 28, 1904 in The Hague, Netherlands. She studied biology at the University of Leiden and later specialized in larger foraminifera, under the supervision of Dr. Berend G. Escher (1885-1967) and Dr. I. M. Van der Vlerk (1892-1974). She was an assistant of Dr. Heinrich Gerth (1884-1971) for two years at the University of Amsterdam, studying microfossils from the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia). Dr. Caudri worked as a micropaleontologist for the oil industry starting in 1939 when she began working at the Pointe-à-Pierre Laboratory in Trinidad, a world reference center in the field of micropaleontology. Later, from 1945 onwards, she worked for Tropical Oil in Bogota, Colombia, and then in 1950 she started working for the Texas Petroleum Company in Venezuela for a period of 11 years until her retirement in 1961. During her 22 years of uninterrupted work in the Caribbean, she left an important micropaleontological legacy in the field of larger foraminifera through her research and publications. She spent her retirement years in La Tour de Peilz, Canton of Vaud, Switzerland, dedicated to publishing all extensive work developed in the area of Caribbean micropaleontology during her active years in the oil industry, with the support of Dr. Hans Kugler (1893-1986) and the Natural History Museum of Basel. Dr. Caudri showed interest in the arts in general from a very early age. She made excellent pencil drawings and painted sublime Venezuelan landscapes near Caracas, which she left to her relatives. Dr. Bramine Caudri died in Oosterbeek, the Netherlands at the age of 86, on February 2, 1991.