Louis Dollo

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Louis Dollo (date unknown)

Louis Antoine Marie Joseph Dollo (born December 7, 1857 in Lille , † April 19, 1931 in Brussels ) was a Belgian paleontologist from France. From 1878 he directed the excavation and later reconstruction of the famous finds of the Iguanodon dinosaur in the Bernissart coal mine .

Life

Dollo graduated from the Institut industriel du Nord ( École Centrale de Lille ) as an engineer in 1877 and began working as a mining engineer. From 1878 he supervised the recovery of the Iguanodon fossils (31 well-preserved skeletons) discovered at a depth of around 320 m in a coal mine on the Franco-Belgian border in Bernissart for three years . At first this was only a sideline, but in 1881 he moved to Belgium.

From 1882 to 1885 he worked on the reconstruction of the Iguanodon skeletons as curator for vertebrate fossils at the Institut royale des sciences naturelles de Belgique in Brussels and their installation in the Belgian Museum of Natural History , where he became a curator in 1891. During the difficult installation (initially in a church before the transfer to the museum) his training as an engineer benefited him. Its reconstruction as an upright walking biped is now considered outdated, and the skeletons on display in the Natural History Museum in Brussels are now reconstructed as four-legged. It was Dollo who correctly identified the thumb extension that both the first discoverer Gideon Mantell and Richard Owen still placed on the nose, and he distinguished two types among the finds. In 1909 Dollo became professor of paleontology at the University of Brussels (Solvay Institute).

Dollo's law (1905), also called the law of irreversible evolution, is named after him . However, it was questioned by Michael F. Whiting and colleagues in a 2003 Nature article. In the case of ghosts , they found that some species first lost their ability to fly, but regained their ability to fly 50 million years later. At the molecular level, however, confirmation of the law was found in 2009 when studying the development of glucocorticoid receptors.

In 1912 he became an honorary member of the Paleontological Society . In 1912 he received the Murchison Medal from the Geological Society of London . In 1928 he was elected a corresponding member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences . Since 1928 he was a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences . Also in 1928 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and to the then Soviet Academy of Sciences .

literature

  • Stephen Jay Gould Dollo on Dollo's Law: Irreversibility and the Status of Evolutionary Laws , Journal of the History of Biology, Volume 3, 1970, pp. 189-212

Fonts

  • Stephen Jay Gould (Editor): Louis Dollo's papers on paleontology and evolution: Original Anthology , New York, Arno Press, 1980
  • David B. Weishampel, Nadine M. White (editors): The Dinosaur Papers , Smithsonian Institution Books, Washington, 2003 (some of the works by Dollo)
  • Dollo Première note sur les dinosauriens de Bernissart , Bulletin du Musée Royal d'Histoire Naturelle de Belgique, Volume 1, 1882, pp. 161-180
  • Manuel de paleontologie . Paris 1886 doi: 10.5962 / bhl.title.61573
  • Poissons . Anvers 1904 doi: 10.5962 / bhl.title.13845

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Whiting, Sven Bradler, Taylor Maxwell Loss and Recovery of Wings in Stick Insects , Nature, Volume 421, 2003, pp. 264-267, Abstract , Walking before flying
  2. ↑ Bridgham, Ortlund, Joseph W. Thornton Nature, Volume 461, 2009, p. 515, article in the New York Times, September 29, 2009 , Protein burns its evolutionary bridges , Nature News 2009
  3. ^ Paläontologische Zeitschrift 1, Issue 1, March 1914, p. 65
  4. ^ Member entry of Louis Dollo (with picture) at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences , accessed on February 3, 2016.
  5. ^ Members of the previous academies. Louis Dollo. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences , accessed on March 15, 2015 .
  6. ^ Foreign members of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1724. Louis Dollo. Russian Academy of Sciences, accessed August 28, 2015 (in Russian).
personal data
SURNAME Dollo, Louis
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Dollo, Louis Antoine Marie Joseph (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Belgian paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 7, 1857
PLACE OF BIRTH Lille
DATE OF DEATH April 19, 1931
Place of death Brussels