Charles Immanuel Forsyth Major

Charles Immanuel Forsyth Major (born August 15, 1843 in Glasgow ; † March 25, 1923 in Kaufbeuren ) was a Scottish-British, Swiss zoologist and paleontologist who dealt specifically with vertebrates.

Life

Charles Immanuel Forsyth Major studied at the University of Basel and the Georg-August University of Göttingen , received his doctorate in Basel in 1868 and then settled as a doctor in Florence. With the support of the Italian government, Major collected fossils in Calabria, Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily. In 1886 he gave up his profession as a doctor and collected fossils in Greece. He left this collection to the Collège Galliart in Lausanne and the British Museum in London. In the latter, it is mainly objects from Madagascar that he brought back from his expedition from 1894–1896. He discovered the family of Megaladapidae , which died out 500 years ago, including the "Koalalemurs" and the giant lemurs. He compiled the first systematic collection of Madagascar's mammals. In 1899 he published a new description of the of Hermann von Meyer in 1870 from the fossil deposit Rott described pikas -Skelettes.

Fonts

• On Fossil and Recent Lagomorpha . In: Transactions of the Linnean Society of London, 2.7, Part IX of November 1899, London 1896–1900, pp. 433–520, plates 36–39 ( digitized version )

literature

• PD Jenkins, MD Carleton: Charles Immanuel Forsyth Major's expedition to Madagascar, 1894 to 1896: beginnings of modern systematic study of the island's mammalian fauna. In: Journal of Natural History 39 (20), 2005, pp. 1779-1818