Ernst Zimmermann (natural scientist)

Ernst Zimmermann (* 1854 in Menden ; † 1923 in Nagold ) was a German naturalist, teacher and fossil collector.

Zimmermann was a teacher in Dorstfeld from 1876 ​​to 1883 and then until 1921 at the Catholic elementary school in Schwelm . He died in 1923 on a trip to the Black Forest.

From 1898 to 1918 he was chairman of the Schwelm educational association and, until his death in 1911, deputy chairman of the Schwelm local history association, whose natural history collection he built up. He built up an extensive collection of fossils from the mass limestone of the middle Devonian ( Schwelm facies ) from the area around Schwelm. There were many fossils from the rubble holdings (red mountains) of the former mining of brown iron stone. He had contacts with the geologist Werner Paeckelmann , who scientifically worked on the central Devonian mass limestone at the PGLA. In his fundamental treatise on this from 1922, he often referred to the Zimmermann collection (Paeckelmann described 130 fossil animal species from the Schwelm mass limestone). The local history association bought Zimmermann's fossil collection in 1924 (it is now in the Martfeld house). In a revision of the collection ( Lutz Koch ), 2000 gastropod specimens were found.

He was the father of the geologist at PGLA Ernst Zimmermann . He mainly worked on the Lower Rhine and not on his father's Schwelmer Kalk, but through him some copies of his father's collection came to the Natural History Museum in Berlin.

literature

• Lutz Koch: Ernst Zimmermann, father and son . In: Contributions to the local history of the city of Schwelm and the surrounding area, NF, Volume 53, 2004, pp. 41–46 pdf

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Werner Paeckelmann: The Middle Devonian mass limestone of the Bergisches Land . Dep. Kgl. Prussia. L.-Anst. New episode 91, Berlin 1922