Jost Wiedmann

Jost Wiedmann (born March 31, 1931 in Breslau ; † December 2, 1993 in Tübingen ) was a German paleontologist .

Life

Father Alfred Wiedmann was a master builder in Breslau. Jost W. attended the Maria-Magdalenen-Gymnasium there from 1941 . A classmate was Walter Odersky , President of the Federal Court of Justice from 1988 to 1996 . The Wiedmann family fled to Berlin at the end of the war in 1945 . From 1950 to 1955, Wiedmann studied first in Berlin , then at the University of Tübingen . He received his doctorate there in 1960 under Otto Heinrich Schindewolf , completed his habilitation in 1965 and was appointed professor in 1979 . In his academic career he made a major contribution to the Collaborative Research Center on Paleoecology, which ended in 1984 . Because of the better working conditions in Tübingen, he turned down a professorship at the University of Hamburg in 1984 . Jost Wiedmann died after a long illness at the age of 63.

Services

The Wiedmann chalk seminar was a permanent fixture at the Tübingen Institute for Geology and Paleontology for many years . As Schindewolf's successor, Wiedmann became one of the leading systematists of the chalk ammonites, which he examined worldwide (most recently also in Nepal ) with a focus on the western Mediterranean and northern Spain . With his working group set up in the Institute for Geology and Paleontology, he had formed a kind of “conspiratorial community”. Several of his former doctoral students are working successfully in scientific research - at home and abroad. Two of his “students” were offered a professorship in 1993/94. Wiedemann shared his research results in around 150 articles in scientific journals and in thematic volumes. He also maintained close contact with institutes at home and abroad and participated in major international projects. Jost Wiedmann was a member of the German Stratigraphic Commission (DSK), the Geological Association (GV), the Palaeontographic Society, the Palaeontological Association (PalAss), the Société Géologique de France (SGF), the Palaeontological Society and the Palaeontological Society of Japan. He made a special contribution to contacts with colleagues from Eastern Europe, including Russia . In 1990 he was awarded the “Minister Prize” of the Polish Ministry of Education. In March 1996 a three-day international symposium was held in honor of Jost Wiedmann's 65th birthday by the Institute of Geology and Paleontology at the University of Tübingen. Scientists from Germany, Sweden , Switzerland and the USA gave lectures on Wiedmann's specialty, the " Cretaceous ammonites " ( Cretaceous 130 to 60 million years ago). The focus of the symposium funded by the German Research Foundation was the history of the development of these extinct cephalopods, taking into account geological and climatic environmental conditions.

Publications

• Literature by and about Jost Wiedmann in the catalog of the German National Library
• Ammonites of the vascogothic chalk (northern Spain), Tübingen 1961
• Lower Cretaceous ammonites from Mallorca , 1962
• Biostratigraphic studies in the northern Spanish Upper Cretaceous , Tübingen 1965
• (Ed.), Aspects of European Chalk , Stuttgart 1979
• (Ed.), Subsidence development in the Cantabrian Variszikum and on the passive continental margins of the chalk , Stuttgart 1982