Wilhelm Marinelli

Wilhelm Marinelli (born November 26, 1894 in Vienna , † April 16, 1973 in Vienna; actually Wilhelm von Marinelli ) was an Austrian zoologist , anatomist and popular educator.

Life

Wilhelm Marinelli was the son of an officer in the Austro-Hungarian Army and bank manager; his great-grandfather was the theater director and poet Karl von Marinelli .

After the First World War ( " in the field ", after almost a year in captivity Italian) Marinelli took his zoology and botany studies in Vienna at Berthold Hatschek and Carl Grobben again and wrote in 1923 his dissertation on rotifers -Eientwicklung. Then he finally turned to comparative vertebrate anatomy. The main reason for this was probably the lectures by the paleobiologist Othenio Abel , who was the first to systematically consider fossils as to how an animal of a certain physique could have lived. (The wings of the flying lizards, pterosauria , were previously seen more as catching screens for food acquisition .) The idealistic morphology ( Carl Gegenbaur ) had previously refused to deal with such questions at all and wanted to leave them at best to the physiologists, in order not to benefit from the To be deducted from “pure teaching”.

Marinelli's first major publication (on the skull of the cave bear , 1929) caused a sensation. Marinelli was supported in particular by the well-known vertebrate anatomist Jan Versluys (1873–1939), who was also teaching in Vienna at the time. Abel, Versluys and Marinelli can therefore be regarded as the founders of functional anatomy . In 1930 Marinelli qualified as a professor at the University of Vienna after a long period of study in the USA ( Rockefeller scholarship) .

Two short articles on "general problems" of the vertebrate head and on the bird skull (1937) in the handbook of the comparative anatomy of vertebrates caused even more sensation in the professional world . Marinelli became full professor in 1942 and 1946 ; in the meantime he took part in the war again in the air force. In 1948 he published another pioneering work in the Austrian Zoological Journal, in which the shoulder girdle of the vertebrates is seen primarily as the posterior support of the gill cavity, while it serves only as a support for the front extremities.

In 1952 he got his own institute alongside Wilhelm Kühnelt. In his science policy he was sometimes very headstrong. In 1953 he began to work with his assistant Anneliese Strenger (1913–1984) on his magnum opus : the comparative anatomy and morphology of vertebrates .

Marinelli was also active on numerous committees in Vienna. Among other things, he has been a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) since 1952 , co-founder of the "Notring" of the Austrian scientific associations, President of the Vienna Animal Protection Association, leading member of the Vienna Institute for Science and Art , Chairman of the Ottakring Adult Education Center (Vienna), where he often gave popular lectures, head of the Institute for Physical Exercise at the University of Vienna and others. It was inevitable that he had to undertake many honors and receive them himself. However, the work on the morphology compendium fell behind, at least more than he had wanted and planned. In 1954 the text on Lampetra appeared , in 1956 Myxine and 1959 Squalus . In the fall of 1959, Marinelli stayed in China for several weeks . He was increasingly troubled by intervertebral disc problems. Despite orthopedic measures, he would hardly have been able to carry out the anatomical preparations for his work without the help of Prof. Anneliese Strengers.

In 1967 Marinelli retired and now wanted to devote himself entirely to his morphology . In 1973 the text on Acipenser was just in print when Marinelli unexpectedly died of heart failure during a trivial hospital stay (April 16, 1973). He was buried in the Upper City Cemetery in Klosterneuburg . Marinelli had two sons with his wife Martha (Stadler).

Criticism and appreciation

Marinelli has been accused of not having kept his promise of a comparative-functional anatomy of vertebrates, because the texts (1954–1973) contained (almost) only descriptives, and even here (almost) only older literature. But Marinelli wanted to summarize the functional relationships in a second volume. (It should have turned out, however, that this Goethe admirer was still a vitalist - his interest in the theoretical foundations of morphology was surprisingly low. Marinelli's student Rupert Riedl in particular pointed out that morphology requires its own style of thinking that threatens to be lost Work The loss of morphology .) Of course, the usefulness of what is already available in the excellent graphic representations of the preparation steps from the hand of the scientific graphic artist Maria Mizzaro- Wimmer (Vienna) is undisputed.

Although Marinelli apparently left nothing behind the "Volume II" announced in 1953 (he always ran a tape in his lecture because he "always had the best ideas when presenting" - he was a staunch intuitionist ), his students continued the work - if only because of the (yes, long existing) graphics for the textually still outstanding six anatomy objects ( salamanders , etc.).

Well-known scholars who profess Marinelli as their teacher include Konrad Lorenz , Otto Koenig , Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt , Antal Festetics , Hans Hass , Rupert Riedl , Wolfgang Schleidt , Friedrich Schaller , Erich Thenius and Reinhard Rieger .

Awards

• 1949: Prize of the City of Vienna for popular education

Fonts

• Wilhelm Marinelli: The descent of humans. Criticism and attempt . Hollinek, Vienna 1948.
• Wilhelm Marinelli, Anneliese Strenger: Comparative anatomy and morphology of vertebrates . tape 1 , Lfg. 1: Lampetra fluviatilis (L.) . Deuticke, Vienna 1954 (preface (1953)).
  • Wilhelm Marinelli, Anneliese Strenger: Comparative anatomy and morphology of vertebrates . tape 1 , Lfg. 2: Myxine glutinosa L. . Deuticke, Vienna 1956.
  • Wilhelm Marinelli, Anneliese Strenger: Comparative anatomy and morphology of vertebrates . tape 1 , Lfg. 3: Squalus acanthias L., super class: Gnathostomata (jaw mouths). Class: Chondrichthyes (cartilaginous fish) . Deuticke, Vienna 1959.
  • Wilhelm Marinelli, Anneliese Strenger: Comparative anatomy and morphology of vertebrates . tape 1 , case 4: Acipenser ruthenus L., super class: Gnathostomata (jaw mouths). Class; Osteichthyes (bony or gill cap fish) . Franz Deuticke, Vienna 1973, ISBN 3-7005-4397-2 .
• Wilhelm Marinelli, W. Klausewitz and others: The animal. Second part. The tribes of the animal kingdom . In: Fritz Gessner (Ed.): Handbuch der Biologie, founded by Dr. Ludwig von Bertalanffy . tape VI / 2 . Academic Publishing Company Athenaion, Konstanz 1965.

literature

• Luitfried Salvini-Plawen , Maria Mizzaro: 150 years of zoology at the University of Vienna . In: Zoological-Botanical Society in Austria (Hrsg.): Negotiations of the Zoological-Botanical Society in Austria . tape 136 . Vienna 1999, p. 1-76 ( directory ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Louis Bolk, E. Göppert, E. Kallius and W. Lubosch: Handbook of the comparative anatomy of vertebrates . 5 volumes, 1931–1939. Urban and Schwarzenberg, Berlin / Vienna.
2. ↑ Wilhelm Marinelli: The shoulder girdle of the vertebrates. Functional analysis study . In: Austrian Zoological Journal . No. 1 . Vienna 1948, p. 129-164 .
3. ^ W. Kühnelt: Obituary . In: Almanac of the OeAW . 1973, ISSN  0378-8644 , p. 333-337 .
4. ↑ Since May 9, 1952, see: 160 Years of the Vienna Animal Welfare Association ( Memento from December 26, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
5. ↑ Rupert Riedl: The loss of morphology . Seifert, Vienna 2006, ISBN 978-3-902406-33-0 .

Web links

• Short biography and picture (from approx. 1955). Retrieved September 30, 2009 .