Peter Ballmann

Peter Ballmann (born June 13, 1941 in Reichenberg , Bohemia ) is a German geoscientist and paleontologist . His research focus is paleornithology .

Life

Ballmann is the son of industrial chemist Otto Ballmann and his wife Frieda, née Gruber. After attending school in Lower Franconia and Hesse from 1946, Ballmann and his family emigrated to Asunción , Paraguay , in June 1951 . He attended the Goethe College there until November 1953. He then completed an apprenticeship at the Colegio Andino in Bogotá , Colombia . Ballmann returned to Germany in 1957. After attending secondary school and secondary school in Pfarrkirchen and Ingolstadt , he received his school-leaving certificate in 1961 . From 1961 to 1963 he studied paleontology for four semesters at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . During the winter semester 1963/1964 he studied in Berlin at the Free University and in the summer semester 1964 he studied at the University of Tübingen . In the summer semester of 1965 he worked as part of his studies at the Rijksmuseum van natuurlijke Historie in Leiden . In 1966 he received his doctorate in palaeontology from the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich with the dissertation The birds from the old Burdigal crevasse filling from Wintershof (West) near Eichstätt in Bavaria under the direction of Richard Dehm at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich. In 1969 a short version of this doctoral thesis was published in the journal Zitteliana . In 1971 he worked as a pedologist in the Ivory Coast . Here he collected in 1972, the type specimen of a weaver bird , the 1974 by Hans Edmund Wolters from the Museum Alexander Koenig as Ballmann Weber ( Malimbus ball manni was) described. From 1973 to 1974 Ballmann worked in Costa Rica , from 1981 to 1984 in Saudi Arabia and 1985 in Swaziland .

In 1973 Ballmann's most important work, Fossil Birds from the Neogene of the Gargano Peninsula (Italy), was published in the Scripta Geologica journal series. This is the first detailed report on the fossil avifauna of the Neogene on the Italian Gargano peninsula and includes 228 bird remains from a total of 32 sites. In 1976 the second part of this work was published, in which a collection of over 300 bird bones from the Upper Miocene Garganos is described.

Ballmann described numerous fossil bird species, the remains of which were discovered in Wintershof , in the Nördlinger Ries and in Gargano, among others . These include Taoperdix miocaena , Alectoris bavarica , Garganoaetus freudenthali , Garganoaetus murivoris , Mirolia brevirostrata , Mirolia dubia , Mirolia parvula , Mirolia mascalidris , Mioglareola gregaria , Tyto gigantea , Tyto robusta , Glareola neogena , Butelo pusillus , Miotyto montispetrosi , Alasio collongensis , Intulula brevis , Strix wintershofensis , Bubo perpastus , Veflintornis Meini , Columba omnisanctorum (now a synonym of Columba pisana ), Apus wetmorei (now a synonym of Apus baranensis ) Zygodactylus ignotus , Zygodactylus grivensis , Trachyphonus europeus and Trachyphonus protractus .

Private

Ballmann was close friends with the Russian vertebrate palaeontologist Evgeni Nikolajewitsch Kurotschkin (1940-2011).

Dedication names

The following species are named after Peter Ballmann: the Ballmannweber (1974, by Hans Edmund Wolters), Primozygodactylus ballmanni (1998, by Gerald Mayr ), Bavaripsitta ballmanni (2004, by Gerald Mayr and Ursula B. Göhlich ) and Garganornis ballmanni (2014, by Hanneke Johanna Maria Meijer ).

literature

• Peter Ballmann: The birds from the old Burdigale fissure filling of Wintershof (West) near Eichstätt in Bavaria (dissertation at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, with a curriculum vitae on page 115).
• Bo Beolens, Michael Watkins, Michael Grayson: The Eponym Dictionary of Birds. Bloomsbury Publishing 2014, p. 47