Devonian and Carboniferous research: homage to Professor Edouard Poty - Foreword

This special volume in homage to Edouard – Eddy – Poty is dedicated to several scientific topics he developed during his career. Rather than an alphabetic or stratigraphic ordering of the contributions, we chose to present the papers following Eddy’s topical chronology, as detailed in the bio- and bibliography of Edouard Poty (compilation by J. Denayer and colleagues).Hence, the first paper deals not only with Eddy’s oldest interest, the Visean rugose corals from southern Belgium, but also the locality, which he has most intensely studied and sampled during his career, Royseux. J. Denayer and colleagues present in that opening paper the description of this Late Visean biodiversity palaeo-hotspot in Belgium. It is self-explaining that Eddy is one of the co-authors. Because taxonomic descriptions are a big and fundamental piece of Eddy’s work, V. Ogar presents herein a paper on the systematic of some selected Carboniferous corals from the Ukrainian Donets Basin.Stratigraphy based on rugose corals is another one of Eddy’s oldest research topics. In this volume it is represented by the contribution of S. Rodriguez and colleagues dealing with Serpukhovian coral biostratigraphy in Morocco.The paper by J.W. Pickett is dedicated to the palaeoecology of the rugose coral genus Symplectophyllum from the Lower Carboniferous of Australia, reflecting one of Eddy’s first paper’s on palaeoenvironmental pressure on corals.The following paper on Visean storm deposits south of the Yangtze Old L