In memoriam of Jean-Claude Rage

Abstract

The palaeontological community suffered a great loss when the prominent French researcher Jean-Claude Rage, Emeritus Research Director (Directeur de recherche émérite) in the Centre de recherche sur la paléobiodiversité et les paléoenvironments at the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris, unexpectedly died of a heart attack on 30 March 2018 in Paris. Jean-Claude Rage was a palaeoherpetologist whose research career spanned more than five decades (see the earlier biographical sketch and career summary by Steyer and Buffetaut [2012] on the occasion of Jean-Claude’s 70th birthday). Jean-Claude excelled at the challenging task of identifying fossil amphibians and squamates from their isolated and often fragmentary, small-sized bones. Such identifications require both a comprehensive knowledge of the numerous and often subtle osteological features that differentiate taxa from each other, coupled with an appreciation for how the diagnostic utility of those features may be confounded by various kinds of intraspecific variation (e.g. individual, ontogenetic, sexual, and temporal). Additionally, Jean-Claude was a renowned specialist in fossil snakes. The identification of fossil snake taxa is especially challenging, because their record is biased towards vertebrae and those bones, which may number in hundreds for a single individual, differ according to their placement along the vertebral column. For those reasons, it is even more challenging to determine whether observed differences between isolated fossil snake vertebrae indicate those bones belong to different species or, instead, are from different positions along the column in a single species or even a single individual. Early in his career, Jean-Claude recognised that the abundant amphibian and squamate bones preserved in the Mesozoic and Cenozoic fossil record not only were taxonomically identifiable but also were informative for stratigraphic correlations and insights into phylogeny, palaeobiogeography, palaeoecology, and taphonomy. Jean-Claude was equally comfortable pursuing solo-authored projects as he was collaborating with colleagues. Thanks to his palaeoherpetological expertise, professionalism, and collegial disposition, Jean-Claude routinely was invited by colleagues to collaborate with them, especially to help identify, describe, and interpret amphibian and squamate fossils found during their fieldwork and museum visits.