Manfred Reichel

Manfred Reichel (born July 8, 1896 in Thielle-Wavre , today the municipality of La Tène ; † November 21, 1984 in Riehen ) was a Swiss zoologist and micropaleontologist specializing in foraminifera .

Life

Reichel was originally German (his father was the head of the Herrnhut boarding school in Montmirail ), but after his parents died he grew up with his uncle in Neuchâtel , where he was naturalized in 1913. He remained connected to the city of Neuchâtel throughout his life and also preferred to speak French. He began to be interested in nature early there, supported by the fact that his uncle was an ornithologist, and was a member of a group of friends Amies de la Nature , which also included Jean Piaget . From 1916 to 1918 he attended the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Geneva, where he took drawing lessons, and from 1918 studied natural sciences, especially zoology, at the University of Neuchâtel , graduating in 1922. In 1926 he received his doctorate in zoology under Otto Fuhrmann with a thesis on a blind Brazilian catfish that won a university award. From 1928 he was an assistant at the Institute for Geology and Paleontology at the University of Basel and from 1933 he was a private lecturer and took over the teaching of palaeontology of invertebrates. At the end of the 1920s, he came to micropalaeontology from the oil geologist August Tobler in Basel, especially the foraminifera, which are of great importance for fine stratigraphy in oil exploration. In particular, he devoted himself to the morphology of large foraminifera, especially the alveolins of the Cretaceous and the Cenozoic . In 1936/37 his monograph on alveolines was published in the Mémoires de la Société paleontologique suisse , the complex structure of which he recorded in numerous drawings. In addition to the alveolins, he also dealt with the orbitolins and especially the fusulins . His courses on micropalaeontology, which he held from 1935, were also attended by students from other Swiss universities. In 1940 he received the first professorship for palaeontology at the university in Basel and in 1955 a personal chair. He also gave courses in micropalaeontology on behalf of UNESCO in Athens from 1956 to 1962 . After his retirement in Basel, his student Lukas Hottinger became his successor there in 1966.

He was a good draftsman, which was particularly useful when studying the complex shells of foraminifera, but he also made reconstruction drawings of the Archeopteryx . In addition to work on foraminifera, he also published on the flight mechanics of bats, birds (he was a passionate ornithologist) and pterosaurs , which he studied with Ferdinand Broili in Munich in 1935 . For his lectures he built a wooden pterosaur model with a 6 m span.

He was the first to demonstrate a sudden change of fauna in the foraminifera at the turn of the Cretaceous / Tertiary. In 1983 he was honorary president of the 2nd symposium on marine foraminifera in Pau.

In 1957 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Dijon .

literature

• Georges Dubois: Naturalistes neuchâtelois du 20e siècle. Editions de la Baconnière, Neuchâtel 1976 ( Cahiers de l'Institut neuchâtelois. H. 19), 111 f.
• Hanspeter Luterbacher: Manfred Reichel (1896–1984). In: Journal of Foraminiferal Research. Volume 16, 1986, p. 161 f. ( doi : 10.2113 / gsjfr.16.2.161 ).
• Hanspeter Luterbacher: Manfred Reichel (1896–1984). In: Bulletin de la Société Neuchâteloise des Sciences Naturelles. Volume 109, 1986, pp. 174-178 ( online ).

Web links

• Jean-Paul Schaer: Manfred Reichel. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland .