Rupert Wild

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Rupert Heinrich Wild (* 1939 ) is a German paleontologist who studies fossil reptiles , amphibians , pterosaurs and dinosaurs .

Until his retirement he was chief curator for fossil amphibians and reptiles at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart .

Wild received his doctorate in 1971 at the University of Zurich under Emil Kuhn-Schnyder on the giraffe- necked dinosaur Tanystropheus longobardicus . There he said he had found evidence of predetermined breaking points in the tail, so that these reptiles, like modern lizards, could sacrifice their tails.

He is the first to describe Ohmdenosaurus (he recognized in the 1970s that the leg bone exhibited in the Holzmaden Museum did not belong to the plesiosaurs, but to a small sauropod and named him in 1978), the pterosaur Dorygnathus mistelgauensis (1971), Peteinosaurus (1978) and Preondactylus and he named Janenschia, first described by Eberhard Fraas, in 1991 in a new classification after the Tendaguru excavator Werner Janensch .

In 1977 he led an emergency excavation as part of the construction of the motorway in Lettenkeuper von Kupferzell with numerous fossil finds of tank burrows and early relatives of crocodiles. The finds were evaluated decades later and supplemented by new excavations.

In 1992 he and Paul Sereno rearranged the Procompsognathus Fund from Württemberg (1909).

He took the view that pterosaurs did not emerge from the archosaurs like the dinosaurs , but that they branched off earlier. The view that they are not closely related to the dinosaurs and that they are not descended from the archosaurs was also taken by Peter Wellnhofer and others. He reconstructed a hypothetical, tree-living, small four-legged ancestor Protopterosaurus , with flying membranes and an extended fourth finger.

Fonts

  • with Max Urlichs , Bernhard Ziegler : The Posidonia Slate and Its Fossils , Stuttgart Contributions to Natural History, State Museum for Natural History, Stuttgart 1994
  • with Urlichs, Ziegler: Fossils from Holzmaden , Stuttgart Contributions to Natural History, State Museum for Natural History, Stuttgart 1986
  • The Triassic Fauna of the Ticino Limestone Alps XXIV. New finds from Tanystropheus (Reptilia, Squamata). Swiss Palaeontological Treatises, 102, Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel 1980
  • The pterosaurs (Reptilia, Pterosauria) from the Upper Triassic of Cene near Bergamo, Italy. In: Bolletino della Societa Paleontologica Italiana, Volume 17, 1978, pp. 176-256
  • The Triassic Fauna of the Ticino Limestone Alps XXIII. Tanystropheus longobardicus (BASSANI) (New results). Schweizerische Paläontologische Abhandlungen, 95, Birkhäuser Verlag, Basel 1973

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dissertation at Worldcat
  2. ↑ Wild Der Giraffehals-Saurier , Naturwissenschaften, 62, 1975, 149–153
  3. ↑ Wild The Triassic Fauna of the Ticino Limestone Alps XXIII: Tanystropheus longobardicus (Bassani) (New Results) , Swiss Paläontologische Abhandlungen , Volume 95, 1974, pp. 4–162
  4. ↑ Wild Die Saurierfunde von Kupferzell , Schwäbische Heimat, 31, 1980, 110–117, The Fossil Deposits of Kupferzell, Southwest Germany , Mesozoic Vertebrate Life, 1, 1980, 15–18, Between Land and Sea Saurians of the Keuper Period , in E Heizmann Geological History of Central European Regions , Volume 2, Munich: Pfeil 1998, Wild, Rainer Schoch The dinosaurs of Kupferzell: current research status, in Norbert Hauschke, Volker Wilde Trias, a completely different world , Pfeil Verlag 1999
  5. ^ Alan Feduccia The origin and evolution of birds , Yale University Press 1999, p. 50
  6. ↑ David Peters “Protopterosaurus” - still the official poster child for pterosaur ancestry , Pterosaur Heresies 2012
personal data
SURNAME Wild, Rupert
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Wild, Rupert Heinrich (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH 1939