Johann Jakob Kaup

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Johann Jakob Kaup (1803–1873)

Johann Jakob Kaup (born April 20, 1803 in Darmstadt ; † July 4, 1873 there ) was a German paleontologist and zoologist .

Life

Johann Jakob Kaup came from a very poor background. His father, Lieutenant Friedrich Kaup, had to leave Darmstadt in a hurry before his son was born because of an argument with another officer. At the same time as Justus von Liebig and Georg Gottfried Gervinus, the young Kaup attended the Latin school, the “ pedagogue ”, which is one of Darmstadt's sights today. For lack of money he dropped out of school in 1819, but began to occupy himself with scientific questions. When his mother died the following year, the seventeen-year-old Kaup was an orphan. Kaup earned his living doing paperwork and selling birds, which he shot with a blowpipe and then stuffed. He had the preparation trade from Dr. Georg Bekker, the director of the natural history cabinet in Darmstadt.

Kaup studied from 1822 in Göttingen, where Georg August Goldfuß taught zoology, after a year he moved to Heidelberg and in 1823 went to the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie for two years after Leiden in the Netherlands , where he was particularly concerned with studies of fish and amphibians. In 1825 Kaup received an assistant position at the museum in Darmstadt and in 1828 was employed by Grand Duke Ludwig I for 440 guilders a year as a "provisional assistant" at the natural history cabinet. He held this position until 1837, when he became a "real inspector". Since his wages were insufficient, he taught the sons of wealthy families. In 1831 the private scholar Kaup received an honorary doctorate from the University of Giessen . In 1834 he was elected a member of the Leopoldina . In the same year he married Elise Hauser; their marriage resulted in four daughters and one son. After completing his printer apprenticeship, the young Joseph Wolf (1820–1899), who would later become the most important animal painter of the 19th century, came to Darmstadt and made lifelike illustrations of the animals Kaup described.

In 1854, Kaup acquired the approximately 3.5 m high skeleton of an American mastodon ( Mammut americanum ) for the natural history cabinet for only 1200 guilders , which had to be sold after the death of the American artist and museum founder Charles Willson Peale . The mastodon, a distant relative and contemporary of the Eurasian mammoth ( Mammuthus primigenius ) from the last Ice Age, can be seen today in the Hessian State Museum in Darmstadt . In 1855 he was invited by Charles Lucien Bonaparte for three months to work in the fish collection of the Musée d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, which he directed. Kaup was in 1858 by Grand Duke Ludwig III. appointed professor of zoology. Since 1862 he was an elected member of the American Philosophical Society .

Johann Jakob Kaup died on July 4, 1873 and was buried in the old cemetery in Darmstadt (grave site: I wall 160). Even in his death in the Kaupstraße (it was 49 ° 52 '51.2 "  N , 8 ° 39' 35.5"  O ) dedicated in Darmstadt, which bears his name today.

Scientific achievements

In his work “ Sketch of the History of the Development of the European Animal World ”, published in April 1829 , Kaup came up with insights that were surprisingly modern for his time and developed principles that are remarkably similar to the principles of biological evolution presented by Charles Darwin in 1859 . However, Kaup later distanced himself from these early theses. In 1832 he accepted the invitation of the Heidelberg natural scientist Heinrich Georg Bronn to collaborate on the New Yearbook for Mineralogy, Geognosy and Petrefactology and published numerous writings that received great attention.

Kaup described and named not only for the first time numerous taxa living today, but also many fossil animals that were extinct in the geological past . The Deinotherium described in 1829 was noteworthy : a trunk animal , numerous specimens of which were found in the Dinotheria sands of Rheinhessen, which is known for its wealth of large mammal remains. Four years later he described the Chalicotherium , a very large claw-bearing odd ungulate from the Miocene ; the following year he set the taxon of pterosaur on (Pterosauria). In 1835 he published his work on the Chirotherium , probably a representative of the Archosauria from the Lower Triassic ( red sandstone ). The find is a pure trace fossil , since Kaup only described it on the basis of a track print found in southern Thuringia near Hildburghausen on a sandstone slab ; the cause of the trace has not yet been identified with certainty. In 1856 Kaup published about an unknown fish species, which he named Leptocephalus brevirostris . It was not until 1893 that his view turned out to be a mistake: what he had thought was a species of its own was actually the so-called willow leaf larva (Leptocephalus larva) of the European eel .

Due to his numerous excellent works on living and fossil animals, Kaup enjoyed great esteem among leading scientists of his time, such as Georges Cuvier , the founder of vertebrate paleontology , and Richard Owen , one of the most important paleontologists of his time, he was in lively correspondence. A number of animal taxa were named in Kaup's honor, for example Kaupichthys , a species of fish from the order of the eel-like .

Fonts

  • Sketched evolutionary history and natural system of the European animal world (1829) digitized
  • Chirotherium Barthii von Hildburghausen. In: New Yearbook for Mineralogy, Geognosy, Geology and Petrefactology, year 1835, Stuttgart 1835, pp. 327–328
  • The Gavial-like remains from the Lias (1842–1844) together with Heinrich Georg Bronn
  • Classification of Mammals and Birds (1844)
  • Contributions to a closer knowledge of primeval mammals (1855–1862)

literature

Web links

Commons : Johann Jakob Kaup  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Member History: Johann J. Kaup. American Philosophical Society, accessed October 18, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Kaup, Johann Jakob
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German paleontologist and zoologist
DATE OF BIRTH April 20, 1803
PLACE OF BIRTH Darmstadt
DATE OF DEATH 4th July 1873
Place of death Darmstadt