Fritz Berckhemer

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Fritz Karl Hermann Berckhemer (born May 25, 1890 in Stuttgart ; † September 2, 1954 there ) was a German paleontologist .

Life

Berckhemer studied after graduating from high school (1909) at the Wilhelms-Realschule in Stuttgart natural sciences at the TH Stuttgart, where he was assistant to the mineralogist and geologist Adolf Sauer (1852-1932). He received his doctorate in 1913 at the University of Tübingen under Josef Felix Pompeckj with a thesis on the Malm epsilon in Swabia. He was then an exchange curator for paleontology at Columbia University with Amadeus William Grabau . In August 1914, when the war broke out, he returned home and was captured on his ship in the canal and interned on the Ile Longue near Brest by the French until 1919. From 1919 he was assistant to Martin Schmidt at the natural history cabinet in Stuttgart . In 1921 he became the second conservator and in 1925 head of the geological department as successor to Martin Schmidt. In 1926 he became chief curator. In 1930 he became a private lecturer in paleontology at the TH Stuttgart and in 1949 an honorary professor. After being sick frequently from 1948 onwards, he retired at his own request in 1953.

He dealt mainly with the upper white Jura of Baden-Württemberg, its stratigraphy and its ammonites and, as chief curator , continued the work of Eberhard Fraas , where he also obtained the new editions from his museum guide. He also examined the Böttinger marble and its fossils.

In 1931 he came across traces of Neanderthals during excavations in the Irpfelhöhle . In 1933 he described the hominid skull from Steinheim an der Murr , which had been discovered in a gravel pit in 1933 (and was recovered by him and the taxidermist Max Böck ). He was called Homo steinheimensis by him .

He was married to the daughter of Eberhard Fraas , the former director of the Stuttgart natural history cabinet.

He is the father of the geophysicist Hans Berckhemer .

In 1952 he became an honorary member of the Palaeontological Society and the Upper Rhine Geological Association . From 1931 to 1937 he published the paleontological journal.

Fonts

  • with Helmut Hölder : Ammonites from the Upper White Jura of southern Germany , Geological Yearbook (Federal Institute Geowiss.), Supplement, Volume 35, 1959
  • Studies on the sea crocodiles of the Swabian upper Lias , Paläontologische Zeitschrift, Volume 10, 1927, pp. 60-64
  • The language of the stones. 48 fossil images based on evidence from the museum , Schöne Bücher series , Stuttgart 1950, 1951 (English translation The language of rocks , New York 1957)

literature

  • Karl Dietrich Adam : The Württemberg natural history collection to Stuttgart in the Second World War . In: From the history of the Stuttgart Natural History Museum. Stuttgart Contributions to Natural History, Series C, No. 30, 1991, pp. 81–97 and note 140 on p. 104 (short biography)
  • WO Dietrich : Fritz Berckhemer, Paläontologische Zeitschrift, Volume 30, 1956, pp. 220-223

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Berckhemer A human skull from the diluvial gravel of Steinheim ad Murr . Anthropologischer Anzeiger, Volume 10, 1933, pp. 318-321
  2. ^ Werner Quenstedt :  Fraas, Eberhard. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 5, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1961, ISBN 3-428-00186-9 , p. 307 f. ( Digitized version ).
personal data
SURNAME Berckhemer, Fritz
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Berckhemer, Fritz Karl Hermann (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH May 25, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Stuttgart
DATE OF DEATH 2nd September 1954
Place of death Stuttgart