Osvaldo Reig

Osvaldo Alfredo Reig (born August 14, 1929 in Buenos Aires ; † March 13, 1992 ibid) was an Argentine paleontologist and zoologist who was particularly concerned with the evolution of mammals .

Life

Reig studied at the Universidad de La Plata , but was forced to drop out in 1952 (he only received a Ph.D. in Zoology and Paleontology from the University of London in 1973) and then volunteered at the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales Bernardino Rivadavia , where he dealt with fossil marsupials, tails and frogs. From 1958 he was at the Miguel Lillo Institute in Tucuman and from 1961 professor at the Universidad de Buenos Aires , where he headed the laboratory for evolutionary biology of vertebrates, where he began to investigate the relationships between living mammals based on the genetic material. In 1966 he was a Guggenheim Fellow at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and in the same year he moved to the Universidad Central de Venezuela . He stayed in Venezuela for 15 years, where he also taught at the Universidad de los Andes and the Universidad Simón Bolívar . During this time he investigated the evolutionary development of a circular chromosome shape in spiny rats of the genus Proechymis . In 1971 he went to London with another Guggenheim Fellowship, where he did research at the university and at the Natural History Museum. After receiving his doctorate in London in 1973, he went to Chile to the Universidad Austral de Chile , where he set up the Institute for Ecology and Evolution, but returned the same year to Buenos Aires, where he was again a professor at the university. In 1974 he was released and went back into exile in Venezuela due to the political situation. In 1983 he returned to Argentina, became a scientist in the national research organization and founded a research group in evolutionary biology at the University of Buenos Aires. During this time he dealt with the evolution of burrowers (Cricetidae) and guinea pig relatives (Caviomorpha).

In 1986 he became a foreign member of the National Academy of Sciences and the Soviet Academy of Sciences and the Third World Academy of Sciences . In 1988 he received an honorary doctorate from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and in 1991 from the University of Buenos Aires. In 1983 he founded the Argentine Society for Mammalogy (Sociedad Argentina para el Estudio de los Mamíferos, SAREM) and was its first president.

Reig is Erstbeschreiber of Herrerasaurus (1963) and saurosuchus (1959).

Dedication names

The dinosaur species Bonatitan reigi and the endangered Olvaldo Reig comb rat ( Ctenomys osvaldoreigi ) are named in his honor.

literature

• Virgilio G. Roig: Osvaldo A. Reig: 1929-1992, Journal of Mammalogy 73, 1992, pp. 9340-9342, JSTOR, 1st page