Hou Xianguang

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Chinese. Hou is the family name here, Xianguang is the first name.

Hou Xianguang ( Chinese  侯先光 , Pinyin Hóu Xiānguāng ; * March 1949 , Fengxian , Jiangsu ) is a Chinese paleontologist whose works have made a decisive contribution to the discovery of the Chengjiang fauna .

Life

Hou received his education in Xuzhou and then studied in Nanjing . In 1977 he obtained a degree in geosciences and initially worked as a lecturer in the same department. After completing a master's degree in geology and paleontology at the Institute of Geology and Paleontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Nanjing in 1981, he became an associate professor in 1992 and a professor in 1994. In 1997 he also obtained a doctorate from Uppsala University , Sweden, and has been a professor at Yunnan University since then , where he holds the Yunnan Key Laboratory for Palaeobiology ( Chinese  云南省 古生物 研究 重点 实验室 , Pinyin Yún nán shěng gǔ shēng wŭ yán jiū zhòng diǎn shí yàn shì ) has established and directs. In 1984 he discovered the Chengjiang Fauna Community in the course of lengthy field work and made great contributions to the development of conservation methods for "soft-body fossils ". The discovery, at the same time as the Burgess Shale fossils in Canada , was one of the most spectacular discoveries in paleontology of the 20th century.

Honors

He received the First Prize of National Natural Science of China 2003, the Prize for Science and Technology Progress of Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation 2004, the Special award for Natural Sciences of Yunnan Province , the Sci-Tech Outstanding Contribution Award of Yunnan Province and was Vice President of the International Palaeontological Association from 2006 to 2010.

The sea ​​anemone Xianguangia sinica is named after him.

Works

A detailed bibliography can be found on the website of the Yunnan Key Laboratory for Palaeobiology [1] .

• Cambrian fossils of Chengjiang, China.
• Nationalnyckeln till Sveriges flora and fauna. Myriapoda: Denna volym omfattar samtliga nordiska arter.
• The Chengjiang fauna. Exceptionally well-preserved animals from 530 million years ago.
• Arthropods of the Lower Cambrian Chengjiang fauna, southwest China, 1997 (Nanjing Inst. Of Geology and Palaeontology, Academia Sinica, Nanjing, China).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ “will be forever built into the edifice” and the discovery as “among the most spectacular in this century.”
2. ↑ Biography of the Ho Leung Ho Lee Foundation.

literature

• [2] Yunan Baike Xindu Wang
• Homepage of the Yunnan Key Laboratory for Palaeobiology.
• Homepage of the International Palaeontological Association.