Philippe Thomas
| Philippe Thomas | |
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Philippe Thomas in 1910 by Gaston Percheron
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| Born |
Philippe Étienne Thomas 4 May 1843 Duerne, Rhône, France |
| Died | 12 February 1910 (aged 66) Moulins, Allier, France |
| Nationality | French |
| Occupation | Veterinarian and amateur geologist |
Philippe Thomas (4 May 1843 – 12 February 1910) was a French veterinarian and amateur geologist who discovered large deposits of phosphates in Tunisia. Despite the huge economic importance of his discovery, he received little recognition during his life. Monuments to Thomas in Tunisia were destroyed after the country gained independence.
Philippe Thomas was born in Duerne, Rhône, on 4 May 1843. He attended the École nationale vétérinaire d'Alfort, where he was a brilliant student, and the Cavalry School. He was named an Army Veterinarian in 1865. He was assigned to Algeria, but returned to France at the start of the Franco-Prussian War (1870) and fought in various engagements. He returned to Algeria after the war and took part in suppression of the revolt in the Kabylie in 1871. In his spare time he studied geology, paleontology and other scientific disciplines. Thomas became a qualified geologist.
Thomas classified the succession of Eocene rocks in Algeria from the Mediterranean coast to the Sahara, a succession that he would again find in southern Tunisia. In 1873 in the M'Fatah massif of Algeria Thomas was the first to discover the existence of phosphated nodules from the lower Eocene. In 1875 he studied the fluvio-lacustrine terrains of the Upper Tertiary and Quaternary, and published a series of notes on palaeontology and palaeoethnology. The first, on "Buhalus Antiqus" appeared in the Bulletin of the Climatological Society of Algiers. In the same bulletin he reported the discovery of a prehistoric workshop in Hassi-El-M'Kadden, near Ouargla.
In 1876 the Société des Sciences physiques, naturelles et climatologiques d'Alger recognized his work between 1868 and 1875 in geology and palaeontology by awarding him a silver medal. This was soon followed by his admission to the Société géologique de France. Between 1880 and 1884 Thomas published several papers on his Algerian research, and with the mining engineer Jules Tissot (1838–83) investigated the Eocene formations in the Constantine region, where Tissot suspected the presence of calcium pyrophosphate. Thomas was the first to discover phosphates in the province of Ras El Aioun, Algeria.
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