Lore Rose David

Lore Rose David (born October 23, 1905 in Opladen , † May 10, 1985 in Santa Rosa , California ) was a German-American paleoichthyologist .

Life

education

From 1915 to 1918 David attended the municipal Luisenschule in Düsseldorf and then the higher girls' school in Leipzig . From Easter 1922 to 1923 she completed an apprenticeship at the bookselling college in Leipzig. From 1923 she went to the Nikolai Realgymnasium in Leipzig, where she graduated from high school in 1925. From the summer semester of 1926 she studied biology (zoology and botany) at the universities of Leipzig, Munich and Berlin. On July 25, 1932, she was awarded a doctorate in philosophy in embryology at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin-Dahlem with the dissertation The behavior of extremity regenerates of the white and pigmented axolotl in heteroplastic, heterotopic and orthotopic transplantation and successive regeneration .

research

In Europe

From 1932 to 1933 she was a research assistant at the Senckenberg Nature Museum , where she followed Fritz Haas' advice and devoted herself to ichthyology . From 1933 to 1934 she worked at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris , where she studied the fish from the French colonies. From 1934 to 1937 she moved to the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren near Brussels , where she dealt with the enormous previously unexplored collection from the Belgian Congo .

In the United States

As the situation for Jews in Germany worsened, David emigrated to the United States in 1937, where she lived with her sister and brother-in-law in Pasadena , California, from the fall of 1937 . She was hired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History and worked under the direction of Chester Stock of the California Institute of Technology's Department of Vertebrate Paleontology . Stock encouraged her to focus her research on the fossil fish found in the Miocene deposits of California. From 1938 to 1943 she worked as a geologist at the California Institute of Technology through an annual grant program.

Southern California is rich in fossil shale and diatomaceous earth from the Middle to Late Miocene. These rocks contain numerous well-preserved, interconnected remains of fish. The study of this fauna had been idle since 1927. The bony fish of the Miocene of California were identified and described in a number of studies between 1907 and 1927 by David Starr Jordan and James Zacchaeus Gilbert . David noticed that the early studies had many flaws in terms of identification, taxonomy, and family relationships. All of these factors suggested that any study of the bony fish of the Miocene of California needed a major overhaul of the earlier work of Jordan and Gilbert. As part of their studies, David examined every available specimen previously studied by Jordan and Gilbert, and hundreds of additional specimens collected. The result of these studies was published in 1943 under the title Miocene fishes of Southern California by the Geological Society of America . David's work provided much-needed corrections and, while now out of date, pioneered the modern paleoichthyology of the west coast of North America.

Next, David focused on fossil fish scales , their use as taxonomic indicators in paleontology , their occurrence in oil well drill samples, and their use in biostratigraphy . Between 1940 and 1957 David published a total of 13 scientific articles on these subjects. They also published some first descriptions for recent and fossil species of fish, including 1936 Gnathochromis permaxillaris and Enteromius haasianus , 1937 Enteromius marmoratus , labeobarbus microbarbis and Campylomormyrus luapulaensis (all with Max Poll ), 1941 Leptolepis Nevadensis from the Cretaceous period , 1944 to shark species Megactenopetalus kaibanus from the Permian and in 1948 a contribution on the fossil genus Laytonia from the Tertiary . In 1957, David published her last scientific article on fossil fish in the journal Treatise on Marine Ecology and Paleoecology .

After 1957 David worked as a librarian.

Dedication names

In 2016 the fossil was Dornhaiart Orthechinorhinus davidae from the Oligocene to Lore Rose David named.

Fonts (selection)

• Miocene fishes of southern California . Society, New York 1943
• Thorium . Oak Ridge, Tenn. : Technical Information Service, 1953 (US Atomic Energy Commission. TID 3044)
• Biological Effects of neutrons, gamma radiation, and neutron-gamma combinations . Technical Information Service, Oak Ridge, Tenn. 1954 (US Atomic Energy Commission. TID 3052)
• with Doris Howes Calloway: Nutrition and radiation injury: an annotated bibliography . Chicago, Ill. 1961

literature

• RW Huddleston, A. Panofsky: Lore Rose David, 1905-1985 Society of Vertebrate Paleontology News Bulletin, No. 144, 1988, pp. 37-39.
• Annette Vogt: Scientists in Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes A – Z Archive for the History of the Max Planck Society, 1999. ISBN 978-3-9275-7912-5 , p. 48

Web links

• Literature by and about Lore Rose David in the WorldCat bibliographic database