Biography

Ken McKenzie

[from the book “Ostracoda of the Italian Ricefield Ecosystems”] Biogeography by Ireneo Ferrari.

Ken McKenzie’s life makes a fascinating story, abounding in travels, places, encounters, interests. Across continents: from India to Australia, from the Philippines to South Africa, from South America to the United States and Europe. And through work and study activities carried out in highly dissimilar professional and scientific contexts: in the oil industry, in international institutions promoting research, in prestigious natural history museums, in universities. McKenzie shaped his unique profile as citizen of the world, and his story as a man of science by nurturing himself on the stimuli and humours of the cultures of different worlds and distilling, re-elaborating and revitalizing the contents of knowledge that usually remains codified within the confines of closed and well-protected disciplines.

His basic formation was in the field of geology: and his early professional activity, carried out in applied geology during the ‘fifties, concerned the use of highly efficient paleoenvironment bioindicators for purposing of oil prospecting. Of particular importance as indicators are the Ostracods, a group of microcrustaceans that have populated the biosphere for more than 500 million years and are now represented by thousands of species, both planktonic and benthic, of all aquatic environments, from temporary fresh-water pools to salt-water lagoons, from coastal marine areas to ocean abysses.

McKenzie was quite an expert of these animals. He analyzed series of samples collected in coastal regions of every continent […].