Michael House (1930 -- 2002)   

      (William Kirchgasser, College at Potsdam, New York, Newsletter 53, p.36-41,  2003).

The universities central to the academic life of Michael House, who died on 6th August 2002,can be appropriately traced on the geological map of England. From his birthplace on the Chalk at Blandford Forum, Dorset (1930), near the south coast, draw a line to Durham (Lectureship, 1954-1963) in the far north.  From Durham follow the broad arc near the base of the Chalk, southeastward to Hull (Professor and Head of Department, 1967--1988) and around and southwestward to Cambridge (first class honors, 1954) and Oxford (Lectureship, 1963-1966) and, with a detour to Southampton (1988--2002), back to the south coast and official retirement in Weymouth (1993). Stratigraphic palaeontology has lost one of its finest und most productive students, the Ambassador for the Devonian with ammonoid portfolio. Butcher (2002) and Neale (2002) captured his life and career in splendid memorials for The Geological Society and Yorkshire Geological Society. This tribute is a view from America.

Michael House's geological roots were quite literally in the Jurassic and Cretaceous of Dorset. One of his earliest papers, The Structure of the Weymouth Anticline (House, 1961) maps the area of his boyhood, where ammonites introduced him to the world of cephalopods und his hero, Arkell, to the world of stratigraphy.  Early on he developed extraordinary skills in geological mapping, outcrop sketching and draftsmanship of charts, the essentials for a life of bed-by-bed fossil collecting.  In this age of computer graphics he will be remembered as one of the last to have preferred pen-and-ink.

It was in the Devonian of South West England and North America that Michael began his life-long study of ammonoid (goniatite) cephalopod systematics und biostratigraphy. Out of the tangled mass of slate and nodule in Devon und Cornwall he brought to light an ammonoid sequence which showed that the major zones of the classic German succession could be recognized in England (House, 1963). Similar discoveries in North America, from the Appalachians in the Eastern U.S. (House, 1962, 1965, 1978) to Western Canada (House and Pedder, 1963), set the stage for a programme of research that radiated across the globe with special focus on New York, Montagne Noire (France), Canning Basin (Australia), Timan Basin (Russia) and Tafilalt Platform (Morocco).  The collaborations und friendships are too numerous to list but his correspondences alone included virtually all the players in Devonian biostratigraphy, major und minor, of his era.

In coming to North America in 1958 Michael followed the route of Lyell, travelling from Cambridge, Massachusetts (Harvard Museum) to Albany (New York State Museum and Geological Survey). But he was tracking Devonian ammonoid type-specimens, and the quest required visits to New York City (American Museum) and Washington, D.C. (U.S. National Museum) and countless other museums, grand to obscure, across the continent. At Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, John Wells introduced Michael to the Devonian of New York, a succession with great potential for biostratigraphic refinement.  He took me on as an assistant to re-examine the classic Upper Devonian Naples Fauna of J.M. Clarke.  Starting with the 1965--66 field seasons, this project expanded over the years to become the still-unpublished monograph (our Opus) outlined in Kirchgasser and House(1981) and House and Kirchgasser (1993.

Michael was a pioneer in the work of the International Subcommission on Devonian Stratigraphy (SDS) and by his own reckoning participated since 1960 in all international Union of Geological Sciences (IUGC)committees charged with defining mid-Palaeozoic stage, series and system boundaries and visited "all sites considered important." His leadership of the SDS intertwined with Willi Ziegler, the great German pioneer of Devonian conodont systematics and biostratigraphy, who by incredible coincidence died two days after Michael.  These rivals guided the SDS to define the Series and Stage boundaries and the Global Stratotype Sections and Points (GSSPs) for the whole of the Devonian. Their joint paper, House and Ziegler (1977), was an important step in the integration of the conodont and ammonoid zonations.

The dissolution of the University of Hull Geology Department, a consequence Mrs Thatcher's experiment, was of course a terrible blow to Michael but he found new colleagues and friends at Southampton and the teaching and research continued uninterrupted. He was sad to see Hull's geological family dispersed. Among his papers is a notebook with tiny photographs with annotations of every Hull geology student of his tenure. Perhaps some former members of the student Harker Geological Society (in conjunction with the Hull Geological Society or Yorkshire Geological Society) could organize a reunion field excursion in his honour, perhaps to his favourite sections on the Yorkshire coast between Whitby and Scarborough. Similarly the Ussher Society should consider organizing a held excursion in Devon und Cornwall.

It was inevitable that the ammonoid investigations of Michael House und R. Thomas Becker would intersect. In 1985 the master met the young prodigy from Germany and an extraordinary partnership commenced. Their expeditions to Australia, France, Russia and Morocco initiated a dramatic refinement and internationalization of the Devonian ammonoid zonation. Paralleling the biostratigraphic work, they introduced a major revision of Devonian ammonoid systematics (e.g. Becker und House, 1993) in which megagenera (such as Manticoceras and Ternoceras) are separated, by details of shell and suture, into smaller monophyletic and biostratigraphically significant groups of species, with many assigned to new genera.  Their prolific collaboration is finalized in Becker und House (2000), in which some sixty international ammonoid genozones are recognized. The new systematics will be incorporated into the revised ammonoid section of the Treatise with Thomas Becker (Münster) taking over Michael's contribution.

Michael had a long fascination with the environmental controls of sedimentary and evolutionary processes. He believed that orbital or Milankovitch cycles are responsible for the small-Scale sedimentary microrhythms that pervade the stratigraphic record, and that by counting such rhythms it would be possible to calculate absolute ages for intervals in the chronostratigraphic scale (House, 1985b, 1991). He also advocated episodic sea-level und temperature changes as principal controls of major evolutionary events (extinctions and originations) as exemplified by the twenty or so major Devonian events (House, 1985a). His final publication on these complex issues (House, 2002) includes his final chart of the Devonian System, his legacy to the succession that was so much a part of his life's work.

Always the gentleman, Michael balanced work and family life beautifully. He was devoted to his loving wife, Felicity and to their children, Sue and Jim, and his grandson, Matt.  Felicity ("Flick") was the bedrock support of Michael's academic and research career.  Generations of geologists from around the world are thankful for their generous hospitality and loving friendship.

Looking northward from the office window in his retirement cottage one can see the steeple of the parish church of St. Andrew, Preston, were the funeral was held, and on a clear day the great White Horse in the Chalk downs of Hardy Country beyond.  Walk out the garden gate and follow the footpath southward past the Roman Temple to the bluff overlooking Weymouth Bay, the Isle of Portland straight ahead.  You will be standing near the axis of the Weymouth Anticline, in the area where geology began for Michael House. Westward is Weymouth in the direction of Lyme Regis.  Eastward, past Osmington Mills, the classic Mesozoic sections continue toward Ringstead, White Nothe, Lulworth, Kimmeridge and St. Alban's Head, the magnificent Dorset Coast, designated a Natural World Heritage Site through the efforts of geologists like Michael House. On weekends shortly before his death he was still leading field excursions for locals, doubtless using his own Geologists'Association field guide (House, 1989), living a geological and family life fully to the end. His Devonian papers, maps and specimens will be housed in Oxford, and Jurassic ones in a room in the County Museum, Dorchester, to be named in his honour.

As for the Opus monograph, Late Devonian Goniatites from New York, I was able to tell him, two weeks before he died, that it had passed reviews for publication in the Bulletins of American Paleontology of the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI), Ithaca.  The manuscript is sitting on my desk as I write this. I still tinker with it, but in my heart I know that soon I must let it go.