Bernard Krebs

Bernard Krebs , also Bernhard Krebs (born June 9, 1934 in Basel ; † March 29, 2001 in Chanceaux ) was a French vertebrate paleontologist and professor at the Free University of Berlin .

Life

Krebs came from an Alsatian family and went to school in Mulhouse . He first studied natural sciences from 1952 at the University of Strasbourg and from 1956 paleontology at the University of Zurich with a doctorate under Emil Kuhn-Schnyder in 1963. The subject of the dissertation was the archosaur Ticinosuchus ferox from the triad of the famous Monte San Giorgio site in Ticino, a find site which Kuhn-Schnyder researched intensively with his students. He then worked as a research assistant at the Free University of Berlin with Walter Georg Kühne (1911–1991), whose institute was known for research on mammals of the Mesozoic and where he completed his habilitation in 1969. From 1971 until his retirement in 1999 he was a professor there. An appointment to the professorship for palaeontology, which was already considered certain in 1977, was omitted for reasons of university policy and Krebs was the managing director of the Institute for Paleontology for more than ten years. In retirement he lived in Chanceaux in Burgundy on an estate that he had restored. He died of a stroke.

From 1973 to 1982, together with Siegfried Henkel, Krebs led the excavations in the former Guimarota coal mine in Portugal, which turned out to be a rich site, particularly for mammals from the Upper Jurassic . Among other things, Henkel found the first complete skeleton of a mammal from the Jurassic period there in 1976, which Krebs later placed as a type specimen of the genus Henkelotherium - in memory of Henkel . The find was announced in 1977, but the monograph did not appear until 1991.

He also excavated in southern France, Spain, Morocco, Iran and Sudan. In addition to Jura mammals, a focus of his research was on Late Cretaceous vertebrates in Africa, where fossil finds of lung fish, amphibians, snakes, crocodiles and dinosaurs were found in Sudan. Previously, there were hardly any known finds in sub-Saharan Africa from this period.

In 1994/95 he was chairman of the support group of the natural science museums in Berlin. He was a member of the Council Scientifique de Palaeovertebrata in Montpellier .

He was married and had four children.

He was a French citizen.

Fonts

• Ticinosuchus ferox nov. gen. nov. sp. A new pseudosuchier from the triad of Monte San Giorgio. In: Swiss paleontological treatises. 81, 1965, ISSN  0080-7389 , pp. 1-140.
• For the interpretation of the Chirotherium tracks. In: Nature and Museum. Volume 96, 1966, ZDB -ID 123242-3 , pp. 389-396.
• The archosaurs. In: The natural sciences . Volume 61, number 1, 1974, pp. 17-24, doi : 10.1007 / BF00602887 .
• On the early history of mammals. In: Nature and Museum. Volume 105, 1975, pp. 147-155.
• Pseudosuchia. In: Oskar Kuhn (founder), Peter Wellnhofer (ed.): Handbuch der Paläoherpetologie. Volume 13: Alan J. Charig , Bernard Krebs, Hans-Dieter Sues , Frank Westphal: Thecodontia. Gustav Fischer, Stuttgart et al. 1976, ISBN 3-437-30184-5 , pp. 40-98.
• Mesozoic mammals - Results of excavations in Portugal. In: Meeting reports of the Society of Friends of Natural Science in Berlin. Neue Episode 28, 1988, ISSN  0037-5942 , pp. 95-107.
• The skeleton of Henkelotherium guimarotae gen. Et sp. nov. (Eupantotheria, Mammalia) from the Upper Jura of Portugal (= Berlin geoscientific treatises. Series A: Geology and Paleontology. 133). Free University - Department of Geosciences, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-927541-32-X .
• as editor with Thomas Martin : Guimarota. A Jurassic Ecosystem. Pfeil, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-931516-80-6 .

literature

• Winand Brinkmann: Bernard Krebs. In: Paleontological Journal. Volume 75, number 1, 2001, pp. 1-6, doi : 10.1007 / BF03022591 .

Web links

• Obituary at the FU Berlin by Thomas Martin