Georg Baur (paleontologist)

Georg Baur

Georg Baur (born January 4, 1859 in Weisswasser , Bohemia ; † June 25, 1898 in Munich ) was a German paleontologist and zoologist ( herpetologist ).

Life

Baur was the son of the later director of the forest science research institute in Munich Franz von Baur (at the time of Baur's birth he was chief forester) and nephew of Gustav Baur . He grew up in a forester's house and, corresponding to his father's professional career, was raised in Hohenheim near Stuttgart. From 1873 to 1877 he attended the Realgymnasium in Stuttgart and then studied natural sciences in Hohenheim, Munich and Leipzig, among others with Karl Alfred von Zittel . In 1879 he became active in the Corps Franconia Munich .

In 1882 he received his doctorate in Munich ("The tarsus of birds and dinosaurs, a morphological study") and was then assistant to Karl Wilhelm von Kupffer . He married in 1884 and became an assistant to Othniel Marsh at Yale University , which he remained until 1890 when a conflict with Marsh broke out (Baur was an admirer of Edward Drinker Cope ). After collecting fossils of fish and reptiles for von Zittel in western Kansas over the summer, he became a lecturer in comparative osteology and paleontology at Clark University . He wrote a monograph on North American turtles and in 1891 undertook an expedition to the Galapagos Islands with rich botanical and zoological yields, the evaluation of which occupied him for a long time. In 1892 he became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago . There he built up the paleontological department and went on an expedition himself to collect fossils in Wyoming, while EC Case collected in the Permian of Texas. In 1897 he fell ill with a nervous disorder (paralysis) and went on a trip to Europe (Munich, South Tyrol) to relax, but this did not bring any improvement. He died in a mental institution and was buried in Munich.

He was a neo- Lamarckist , a point of view which he already took in his dissertation and from which he did not deviate - on the contrary, the study of island populations encouraged him in this. He was considered a leading expert on reptiles and their skeletal structure, both fossil and recent species. He was less interested in the description of new species than in comparative studies of skeletal structures and the conclusions that emerged from them about relationships and ancestry. He wrote around 140 papers, often in American Naturalist or Zoologischer Anzeiger and in short, condensed form. He was of the opinion that dinosaurs did not form a closed group, but came from three archosaur groups that had little to do with each other. He considered frog and tail amphibians (Batrachia) to be descendants of the coelacanth (Crossopterygier) instead of the lungfish (Dipnoi). In their study of pelycosaurs (Anatomischer Anzeiger 1897), he and EC Case considered them to be related to the Rhynchocephalia , but not to the mammalian ancestors that were descended from the Gomphodontia after them .

From his study of the animals and plants of the Galapagos Islands and in particular the diversity of the fauna on various neighboring islands (he specifically examined lizards of the genus Tropidurus ), he concluded that they were once connected to the Central American mainland and not, as Charles Darwin assumed, of volcanic origin and settled from the mainland. Most recently he extended this to other islands in the Pacific.

He named the reptile family Mixosauridae , the genus Mixosaurus (1887), the infraorder Nothosauroidea (1889) and the families Nothosauridae and Pistosauridae . He named subspecies of the Galápagos giant tortoise Chelonides nigra and several reptiles are named in his honor ( Kinosternon baurii , Phyllodactylus baurii , Terrapene carolina bauri ).

Fonts

• On the morphology and origin of Ichthyopterygia. In: American Naturalist, 21, 1987, pp. 837-840
• About the origin of the extremities of the Ichthyopterygians. In: Jber. Mitt. Oberrhein. geol. Association, 20, 1 tab .; Stuttgart 1887, pp. 17-20
• Palaeohatteria Credner, and the Proganosauria. In: American Journal of Science, 37, 3, 1889, pp. 310-313
• The ichthyosaur palatine area. In: Anatomischer Anzeiger , 19, 1895, pp. 456–459

literature

• William Morton Wheeler: George Baur's Life and Writings. American Naturalist, 33, 1890, Archives .

References and comments

1. ↑ Kösener Corpslisten 1930, 108 , 425
2. ↑ Morpholog. Jahrbuch, 8, 1883, pp. 417-456
3. ^ Remarks on the reptiles generally called Dinosaurs, American Naturalist, 25, 1891, pp. 434-454