French mining engineer, botanist and paleobotanist.
At the beginning of 1871 Zeiller was named engineer of the sous–arrondissement of Tours and assigned to supervise work on a portion of the Orleans railway. He returned to Paris in 1874, still working for the same administration and holding the same rank for ten years, until his promotion to chief engineer. In 1882 he transferred to the Service de Topographie Souterraine des Bassins Houillers de France. Rising steadily through the hierarchy of the Conseil General des Mines, he ultimately became its president in 1911. Admired for his scrupulousness in fulfilling his duties, he was appointed, in addition, a member of the Commission des Appareils a Vapeur.
In 1878 he was appointed chargé de cours of plant palceontology at the École des Mines in Paris. Named curator of the school’s paleontology collections in 1881, he made such important additions to the collections that scientists came from all over the world to study them
Zeiller studied fossil plants in order to determine their structures and relationships. At the same time he viewed them as constituents of large groups, the relative ages and geographic distribution of which he attempted to establish.
Zeiller did not restrict his numerous publications to material gathered in France. Through his study of the Glossopteris floras (he established that they come from the Permian-Triassic period, as the geologists held)m and his attribution of different ages-and not always from the Carboniferous-to coals of varied origins (Tonkin, Chile, New Caledonia),he was the author of several revolutionary ideas
Zeiller had an impressive capacity for work. Beyond his professional activities and personal research, he also wrote a remarkable treatise on paleobotany and regularly published bibliographic analyses containing abundant new critical commentary. In spite of an incurable disease, he retained his kindly manner until the very end.
He died 27 November 1915.