Konrad Klemmer

Konrad Gerhardt Klemmer (born November 25, 1930 in Frankfurt am Main ) is a German herpetologist . His research focus is the family of the real lizards (Lacertidae).

Life

Konrad Klemmer was the son of Georg and Helene Klemmer, nee Köhler. As a teenager, shortly after the end of the Second World War, he volunteered for the Senckenberg Museum . In 1946 he became a member of the Senckenberg Natural Research Society (SNG). In 1949 he began studying zoology, botany, chemistry and paleontology at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main . His academic teachers included Hermann Giersberg , Robert Mertens , Otto zur Strassen , Camill Montfort , Karl Egle and Rudolf Richter . In November 1957, under the supervision of his doctoral supervisor Robert Mertens, he was awarded a doctorate with the dissertation “Studies on the osteology and taxonomy of European wall lizards”. phil. nat. PhD. In April 1956 he was employed as an assistant assistant at the herpetological department of the Senckenberg Museum, a year later he became a research assistant and from April 1962 a curator, an office which he held until his retirement in November 1995. Klemmer mainly devoted himself to the lizards. Further research interests included all European amphibians and reptiles as well as venomous snakes with their convergent adaptation to tropical habitats. Klemmer was the first herpetologist to study the moulting mechanism of sea ​​snakes . He also undertook collective expeditions to Morocco and the western Sahara in the 1960s .

In addition to Mertens, Klemmer was one of the founding members of the German Society for Herpetology and Terrarium Science and its magazine Salamandra in 1964 . From 1968 to 1982 Klemmer was chairman of this company. In 1964 he became the director of the Senckenberg School, the only vocational school in Germany that trains technical assistants for natural history museums and research institutes.

After the Federal Republic of Germany joined the Washington Convention on the Protection of Species (CITES) in 1976, the Federal Office for Food and Forestry set up a scientific advisory board which acted as an advisory and expert body in all matters relating to species protection. Klemmer was a founding member and was elected chairman of the committee until 1992. In this capacity he was also a German delegation member of the CITES conferences from New Delhi (1981) to Kyoto (1992).

Klemmer took over the public relations department of the Senckenberg Natural Research Society from Wolfgang Klausewitz after he retired in 1987. After Klemmer left active museum service, Gunther Köhler (head of the herpetological department), Michael Türkay (director of the Senckenberg school) and Peter Königshof (head of public relations) were his successors.

Klemmer described two reptile species, in 1967 together with Robert Mertens and Ilja Sergejewitsch Darewski (1924–2009) the Elbour 's mountain otter ( Montivipera latifii ) and in 1994 together with Gunther Köhler the iguana species Ctenosaura flavidorsalis from Guatemala.

Three types of reptiles are named after him: Argyrophis klemmeri , Lygodactylus klemmeri and Phelsuma klemmeri .

literature

• Senckenbergische Naturforschende Gesellschaft: Senckenberg-Nachrichten: Konrad Klemmer retired In: Natur und Museum, 126 (5), Frankfurt a. M, May 1, 1996, pp. 33-34
• Bo Beolens, Michael Watkins, Michael Grayson: The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD 2011, ISBN 978-1-4214-0135-5 , p. 143

Web links

• Short biography at Prabook