Emil Racoviţa (also spelt Racovitza) was a Romanian biologist and explorer. Primarily a zoologist, he was one of the first scientists to study cave organisms, laying the foundations for the discipline of biospeleology.
Racoviţa was born in IaşI and grew up on the family estate in Sorăneş, Vaslui County. After his schooling in Romania he studied law in Paris, graduating in 1889. He did not pursue this subject, however, and turning to natural sciences earned a BSc degree in 1891 and his PhD in 1896, with a thesis on polychaetous annelids.
Following his studies, Racoviţa was selected to join a scientific expedition to Antarctica mounted by the Royal Society of Geography in Brussels. The Belgica left for the south in August 1897, carrying a team of 19 scientists and crew, who would make meteorological observations and gather scientific collections from beyond the Antarctic Circle.
After the party's return to Europe in 1899, ten volumes were published giving an account of the findings and collected material. Two members of the expedition had died, including the Belgian physicist Emile Danco. Racoviţa published his own results in 1900, entitled La vie des animaux et des plantes dans l'Antarctique. He also published a volume on cetaceans, while his collections of flora and fauna were studied by many researchers. The following year, he became director of the Banyuls-sur-Mer oceanography laboratory and editor of the Archives de zoologie expérimentale et générale.
After discovering a new crustacean in a cave in Mallorca in 1904, Racoviţa's specialisation became the study of cave organisms, biospeleology. His Essai sûr les problèmes bioespéleologiques was published in 1907, and over the course of his career Racoviţa would explore more than a thousand caves in France, Spain, Italy, Slovenia and Algeria, paying special attention to isopoda. With his colleague René Jeannel he is considered the founder of biospeleology.
Racoviţa was appointed professor in the biology department of Upper Dacia University (Babeş-Bolyai University) in Cluj in 1919, where he founded the first ever speleological institute in 1920. In the same year he was elected to the Romanian Academy, and served as its president in 1926-1929. The Institute of Speleology, which he directed until 1947, is now named in his honour.
