José Royo Gómez
(Castellón, 1895 – Caracas, Venezuela, 1961)

José Royo was one of the most significant figures in contemporary Spanish geology. He studied at the University of Madrid and joined the Museum of Natural Sciences when he was 20 year old. He received one of the first grants given by the Junta para Ampliación de Estudios (JAE) for the 1916-1917 academic year.  He obtained several other grants, also from the JAE, which allowed him to complete his training in the most prestigious museums of natural history and universities of Europe, such as Zurich. Geneva, Lyon and Paris, Brussels, Munich, Stuttgart, Frankfurt, Cambridge, Oxford, and London. He dedicated his Ph.D. dissertation on “El mioceno continental ibérico y su fauna malacológica,” published by the JAE in 1922, to his teacher and mentor, Hernández-Pacheco. His research focused primarily on the continental Tertiary of the Iberian Peninsula, but he also made 1/50,000 geological scales of Madrid and Alcalá de Henares.

In 1922, he began teaching Practice of Geology at the Museum of Natural Sciences to students of the Escuela Superior de Magisterio (School for Teachers), and of the Faculty of Pharmacy. In 1930 the museum established the Section of Paleontology; he was appointed head of the section and made an extraordinary effort to review and catalog the Paleontology collections of the museum.

During the Civil War, he was appointed general manager of Mining and Fuels and attended, as head of the Spanish delegation, the Eighteenth International Geological Congress held in Moscow in July 1937. After the war he went into exile in Colombia, where he worked at the National Geological and Mining Service. Due to the high altitude of Bogotá, his health, let alone that of his wife, was deteriorating, and they decided to move to Venezuela where he had time to found the Asociación Venezolana para el Avance de la Ciencia (The Venezuelan Association for the Advancement of Science), to a large extent, a replica of the JAE.