Wilhelmus Josephus Jongmans

Wilhelmus Josephus Jong Mans (* 13. August 1878 in Leiden , † 13. October 1957 ) was a Dutch botanist and palaeobotanist and stratigrapher of carbon . Its official botanical author abbreviation is “ Jongm. ".

Life

Jongmans was the son of a tailor and studied biology in Leiden and Munich (with Karl Ritter von Goebel ). In 1906 he was in Munich with a dissertation on Moose doctorate . In Munich he also met his German wife, with whom he had eight children. Back in the Netherlands he was at the imperial herbarium in Leiden. He came to palaeobotany through Willem van Waterschoot van der Gracht , who needed a palaeobotanist to explore the coal deposits in the province of Limburg, which borders on Germany , especially for stratigraphic purposes. Jongmans came into contact with the German paleobotanists Henry Potonié and Walther Gothan and with the Scot Robert Kidston in Stirling (the paleobotanist of the Geological Survey of Great Britain). Through Potonié he was commissioned to publish the Fossilium Catalogum in the field of paleobotany, an encyclopedic bibliographical work of all known taxa , which made him one of the best experts on paleobotanical literature. The first edition appeared in 1913. He also wrote some volumes himself ( Equisetales , Lycopodiales , Filicales , Cycadales , Pteridospermae ). His successor SJ Dijkstra, who started out as a palynologist with him, worked on the extensive manuscripts he left behind .

Jongmans dealt with the flora of the Carboniferous, specifically for the purposes of stratigraphy (for which one is mostly dealing with compressed fossils). After the drilling campaigns in the province of Limburg, he headed a geological institute in Heerlen (Geological Bureau), originally founded as a government agency in 1908 and assigned to a consortium of coal mining companies in South Limburg in 1924. Here he organized several successful international conferences on carbon stratigraphy and paleobotany of carbon (1927, 1935, 1951, 1958), the later International Congress of Carboniferous Stratigraphy and Geology. At first he mainly dealt with the Netherlands, later with worldwide finds (including Brazil , Sumatra and Indonesia , USA , where he worked with William C. Darrah , Iberian Peninsula , North Africa , Ukraine , Alps , Turkey , Great Britain ). He was friends with Walther Gothan and published with him, among other things, in 1915 in the archive for deposit research on the flora of the Carboniferous in the Netherlands. With Kidston he wrote a monograph on calamites . In addition to his focus on biostratigraphy , he also dealt with coal petrography and paleogeography .

For a long time the only palaeobotanist of international renown in the Netherlands, he became an associate professor in Groningen in 1932 .

The Jongmans Medal is awarded in the Netherlands as an award in paleobotany.

Fonts

• Instructions for determining the carbon plants of Western Europe. 1911

literature

• Robert H. Wagner, HWJ van Amerom: Wilhelmus Josephus Jongmans (1878–1957): Paleobotanist, Carboniferous Stratigrapher and floral biogeographer. In: Paul C. Lyons, Elsie Darrah Morey, Robert H. Wagner: Historical Perspective of early twentieth century Paleobotany in North America. Geological Society of America Memoir. Volume 185, 1995, pp. 75-90, doi: 10.1130 / MEM185-p75