Kurt Deckert

Kurt Deckert (born March 24, 1907 in Berlin-Friedenau ; † August 1, 1987 in Berlin ) was a German ichthyologist .

Life

Deckert was the only child of advertising manager Paul Deckert and his wife Berta. After graduating from high school in 1928, he studied zoology and botany at the Humboldt University in Berlin . Konrad Herter (1891–1980), whom Deckert regularly accompanied on excursions in the Berlin area, was one of his sponsors . During his studies, Deckert worked at the Zoological Museum Berlin . On February 7, 1937, he received his doctorate in natural sciences with the dissertation “Contributions to systematics and osteology of ranider Froschlurche” . He then worked for two years on a research contract on fringed winged winged (Thysanoptera). In 1939 he became a scientific volunteer and then assistant in the herpetological department. From July 1940 to October 1946, interrupted by military service and imprisonment, Deckert worked as a research assistant at the Zoological Museum. As a soldier and later in Berlin and the surrounding area, he examined tropical diseases. During his stationing in North Africa, he took the opportunity to study the fauna and flora. During this time he not only collected for the Zoological Museum, but also sent live reptiles to Berlin, which were presented in a special exhibition in the Berlin Aquarium Unter den Linden .

After Deckert's return from captivity, he received from Professor Werner Ulrich (1900–1977), the then head of the Zoological Museum, the curatorial post of the ichthyological department, which was headed by Paul Pappenheim (1878–1945) until 1945 . Deckert held this position until 1973. During Deckert's term of office the repatriation and reorganization of the outsourced fish collection fell. He also undertook several collective expeditions to the Caribbean, the Northeast Atlantic and the Black Sea. Deckert's main research focus was functional anatomy. Together with Klaus Günther (1907–1975) he carried out functional-anatomical studies on deep-sea fish that were collected on the expeditions of the research vessels Valdivia and Dana . Deckert and Günther primarily researched the jaw apparatus, the jaw stalk and the skull of real bony fish and studied mouth funnels, trap mouths and other special prey catching devices. In 1950 they published the work "Wunderwelt der Tiefsee", which was translated into several languages. In the period that followed, Deckert carried out research together with ichthyologist Christine Karrer in the Voigtstedt site in Thuringia, the results of which were published in 1965 in the publication "The fish remains of the early Pleistocene from Voigtstedt in Thuringia." In 1961 Deckert wrote the sections on the skullless (Acrania), the cartilaginous fish (Chondrichthyes) and the bony fish (Osteichthyes) in Erwin Stresemann's work "Excursion Fauna of Germany". In 1967 he was involved in the volume fish, amphibians, reptiles from the series Das Urania Tierreich .

In 1956, Deckert married the zoologist Gisela Haagen , with whom he often worked and in 1974 published the joint book “How animals behave”.

Dedication names

In 1967 the Belgian ichthyologist Dirk Frans Elisabeth Thys van den Audenaerde named the cichlid species Tilapia deckerti after Kurt Deckert.

literature

• Hans-Joachim Paepke: In memoriam Kurt Deckert (1907–1987) . Messages from the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. Zoological Museum and Institute for Special Zoology (Berlin). Volume 64. Issue 2. pp. 195-198, 1988