Jørn Hurum

Jørn Hurum 2006

Jørn H. Hurum (born November 4, 1967 in Drammen ) is a Norwegian paleontologist and science popularizer.

biography

Jørn Hurum studied paleontology at the University of Oslo with a diploma (candidate) in 1993 and a doctorate in 1997, both with work on the chalk multituberculata from Mongolia. After that he was at the University of Oslo and became Associate Professor in 2000 and Professor of Paleontology at the Natural History Museum of the University of Oslo in 2013 . Since 2010 he has also been a professor at the University of Svalbard (University Studies at Svalbard, Longyearbyen ), where he does a lot of field work.

He is a well-known science popularizer in Norway, moderates the part Jørns Ecke (Jørns hjørne) in the children's television program Newton and for six months directed the program Hurum and Ødegaard on the radio station Kanal 24 with the astrophysicist Knut Jørgen Røed Ødegaard . For his popular science work, he received the Formidlingsprisen twice (2001, 2009) from the University of Oslo.

In 2011 he became a National Geographic Emerging Explorer and his work has been the subject of documentaries on National Geographic and the History Channel (which collaborated with BBC and ZDF). He wrote seven popular science books in Norway and many newspaper articles.

Pliosaurs on Svalbard

He is known for finds of plesiosaurs , pliosaurs and ichthyosaurs on Svalbard ( Spitzbergen ). In 2007 he excavated a 15-meter-long skeleton of Pliosaurus funkei there, and he is one of the first to describe it.

In the depot of his museum in Oslo, Hurum stumbled upon bones of swimming fins found on Svalbard in 1931, but these could not be clearly assigned. In 2006 the first skeletal remains were found in Svalbard on the south coast of the Isfjord, excavations began in summer 2007 and the skull was recovered in summer 2008. The paleontologist Peter Druckermiller was also involved. The pliosaur found lived 150 million years ago in the Upper Jurassic in the so-called Hispanic corridor, which opened up when Pangea started between Gondwana and Laurasia, when Svalbard was still in a moderately humid climate about the geographical latitude of Oslo or Hamburg; it drifted in the Mesozoic from 45 degrees latitude to 65 degrees north. The marine fauna of that time also included Hybodontiformes , ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and ammonites. The sea was shallow and there were occasional islands, so that dinosaur tracks (Iguanodons from the chalk near Cape Linnaeus on the Isfjord) were found. The pliosaur found probably hunted similarly to the great white shark, but its teeth and jaws and the associated muscles were more comparable to those of crocodiles. The projected bite force was 15 tons per square centimeter, for comparison four times as much as the largest known Tyrannosaurus rex or ten times stronger than the largest great white shark, which measured 1.8 tons, crocodiles measured 1.9 tons and humans it is a maximum of 80 kg. The excavations in the slate were difficult because of the short time available in summer, the permafrost , glacier winds with cold snap, fog and the danger of polar bears. The first evaluation in Oslo showed that the condyle of the skull was twice larger than that of a Tyrannosaurus rex , the animal was over 15 m long, weighed around 45 tons, had four fins, with the almost completely recovered front fin alone having a length three meters long, and the pointed jaw skull was about ten feet long. Until this discovery, the Kronosaurus was the largest pliosaur (a 10 to 11 m long specimen was found in Queensland). The further find area promises many more finds, but there were legal problems afterwards, as a private company for fossil trading raised claims on the site. But one could agree. Pliosaurs are among the largest predatory marine reptiles, in the same niche as the later Cretaceous Mosasaurus , which reached similar sizes.

Darwinius

In 2009 he presented the purchase of the early primate fossil Darwinius masillae from the Eocene (age 47 million years) from the Messel Pit , which came to the University of Oslo via detours from private collectors. Here too he is one of the first to describe it. He named the holotype after his daughter Ida. His public announcement of a “revolutionary” new discovery later turned out to be exaggerated from a scientific point of view, since it probably did not appear to belong directly to the ancestral line of humans and apes. A related 37 million year old find ( Afradapis longicristatus ) in Egypt supported a classification as a relative of today's lemurs .

Fonts

• Menneskets utvikling, Gyldendal 2004
• with Torstein Helleve: Ida, Cappelen Damm 2011
• with Torstein Helleve: Monsterøglene på Svalbard, Cappelen Damm 2012
• with Torstein Helleve: Sjøskorpionen på Ringerike, Cappelen Damm 2015
• with Torstein Helleve: Utrolige dinosaur, Cappelen Damm 2016

Web links

• English biography at the Natural History Museum in Oslo

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Giant marine monster discovered on Spitsbergen , Die Welt, February 27, 2008. That was also the subject of a Terra X broadcast in 2012 (The Monster of Spitsbergen). The film recordings on site in Svalbard came from the excavation of Hurum on Svalbard in the summer of 2008. The discoverers dubbed the pliosaur Predator X or Monster of Svalbard , a similar find was made in Mexico in 1984, which was named similarly ( Monster by Aramberri ).
2. ↑ In 1973, spectacular finds of 200 million year old plesiosaurs were found in Kong Karl's Land with the stomach contents of squids and plants
3. ↑ Peter Baldwin, The Monster of Svalbard , PolarNews Magazine No. 7 , 2008
4. ↑ Rex Dalton, Fossil primate challenges Ida's place , Nature, Volume 461, 2009, 1040