Ernst Koken

Ernst Hermann Friedrich Koken, von Koken since 1907 (born May 29, 1860 in Braunschweig , † November 21, 1912 in Tübingen ) was a German paleontologist .

Life

Koken was the son of Hermann Koken, a clerk in the Brunswick office and later district director of Holzminden . There Koken also went to the grammar school, of which his grandfather was director for many years. From 1879 (before graduating from high school, which he passed in Wolfenbüttel in 1880) he studied geology at the University of Göttingen , in Zurich and at the Humboldt University in Berlin (with Wilhelm Dames and Ernst Beyrich ), where he received his doctorate in 1884. He was then at the Geological-Paleontological Institute (which also included the Museum of Natural History, which was taking up the university's collections at Koken's time) as a university assistant and completed his habilitation in 1888. He was then a private lecturer at the university and, from 1891, an associate professor at the University of Königsberg as successor to Wilhelm von Branca . In 1895 he became professor of geology and mineralogy at the University of Tübingen (again as the successor to Branca). He stayed there until his death. In 1906 he turned down a call to the University of Strasbourg.

He researched, among other things, dinosaurs of the Cretaceous Period ( Wealden ) from northern Germany, about which he published a large paper in 1887. Many of the finds described were so incomplete that a reliable classification is not possible - for example , the tooth find named by Koken as Megalosaurus dunkeri , later named by Friedrich von Huene as Altispinax , and some vertebral finds that he assigned to Hylaeosaurus . Also stenopelix (which was found without head) has been described by Koken 1887 as dinosaurs and remains of Iguanodon .

He also dealt with fossil gastropods and was a pioneer in the study of auditory stones (otoliths) from fossil fish. He also dealt with auditory stones from recent fish, so that his work also had an influence on their systematics.

During his time in Tübingen, he turned increasingly to geology. After a trip to India and Pakistan ( salt mountains ) he dealt with the palaeogeography of the Permian . He dealt with the Triassic (Swabia, Dolomites) and the Ice Age (then called Diluvium ). With Robert Rudolf Schmidt and A. Schliz he edited the book Die Diluviale Vorzeit Deutschlands . In Tübingen he organized a new building (1902) for the institute, which also housed the collections going back to Friedrich August von Quenstedt . The collections were also expanded through coking, particularly in vertebrate paleontology.

Ernst Koken was the first to describe Nothosaurus marchicus KOKEN, 1893.

As the successor to Karl Alfred von Zittel, he was the editor of the journal Palaeontographica.

Koken was a member of the Frisia Göttingen and in 1902 became honorary philistine of the Tübingen fraternity Derendingia . In 1892 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina .

Fonts

• Guide fossils , Leipzig 1896, Archives
• The dinosaurs, crocodilids and sauropterygians of the north German Wealden , Geological-Paläontologische Abhandlungen, Volume 3, 1887, pp. 311-419
• The gastropods of the Baltic Untersilur , Bulletin de l'Académie Impériale des Sciences, Saint Petersburg, Volume 7, 1897, pp. 97-214
• About fish otoliths, especially those of the North German Oligocene deposits , Journal of the German Geological Society, Volume 36, 1884, pp. 500-565
• New investigations on tertiary fish otoliths II , Journal of the German Geological Society, Volume 43, 1891, pp. 77-170
• On the natural classification of fish , 1891
• The pre-world and its evolutionary history , Leipzig, Weigel, 1893
• Contributions to the knowledge of the genus Nothosaurus . Journal of the German Geological Society, Volume 45, 1893, pp. 337–377,
• The gastropods of the Triassic around Hallstatt . Yearbook of the Imperial and Royal Geological Institute Vienna, Volume 46, 1896, Issue 1, 37 - 126
• The gastropods of the Triassic around Hallstatt , treatises of the imperial-royal geological institute, Volume 17, Issue 4, 1897, 1–112
• Contributions to the knowledge of the gastropods of the southern German shell limestone . Treatises on the special geological map of Alsace-Lorraine; New series issue 2, Strasbourg printing and publishing house, Strasbourg 1898 archive
• Paleontology and Descendancy , Jena, G. Fischer, 1902
• Editor with Robert Rudolf Schmidt, A. Schliz The diluvial prehistory of Germany , Stuttgart, Swiss beard 1912

literature

• Wahnschaffe: Obituary, in the journal of the German Geological Society , Volume 64, 1912, pp. 551–553
• Josef Felix Pompeckj : Ernst Koken † . (With a portrait.) Pp. I – IV, Textarchiv - Internet Archive
• Koken, Ernst Friedrich Rudolph . In: Theodor Westrin, Ruben Gustafsson Berg, Eugen Fahlstedt (eds.): Nordisk familjebok konversationslexikon och realencyklopedi . 2nd Edition. tape 36 : Supplement: Globe – Kövess . Nordisk familjeboks förlag, Stockholm 1924, Sp. 1089 (Swedish, runeberg.org ).
• Heinz Walter:  Koken, Ernst. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 12, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1980, ISBN 3-428-00193-1 , p. 438 ( digitized version ).
• Horst-Rüdiger Jarck , Günter Scheel (Ed.): Braunschweigisches Biographisches Lexikon - 19th and 20th centuries . Hahnsche Buchhandlung, Hannover 1996, ISBN 3-7752-5838-8 , p. 337 f .

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Found in the coal seams of Obernkirchen by the Kassel teacher Wilhelm Dunker (1809–1885) and published for the first time by Wilhelm Dames in Berlin in 1884.
2. ^ Windolf Probst: Dinosaurs in Germany . Bertelsmann, 1993, pp. 206, 208
3. ^ Herbert Menzel: Otoliths and their meaning in palaeontology . ( Memento of the original from May 17, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 2008 
4. ↑ There he dealt with the Mesozoic and the Pleistocene (Ice Age) of the Salt Ranges.