A life devoted to fossil vertebrates and the collections of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin – Wolf-Dieter Heinrich: contributions to palaeontology
✍ Scribed by Lutz Christian Maul; Gottfried Böhme; Oliver Hampe; Stephan Schultka; Anthony J. Stuart
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 2007
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 461 KB
- Volume
- 10
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1435-1943
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
On the occasion of his 65 th birthday, the celebrated Berlin vertebrate palaeontologist Wolf-Dieter Heinrich can look back on a very successful and creative scientific life. His research fields cover (in taxonomic order) fossil fishes, reptiles, birds, and Mesozoic mammals, and especially Quaternary mammals, large and small. Moreover, his wide interests also include fossil invertebrates, and interdisciplinary issues in geo-and biosciences (see list of publications). However, his most important contribution, for which he has achieved a well-deserved international reputation, has been in the field of Pliocene and Pleistocene small mammals.
Wolf-Dieter Heinrich was born on September 20, 1941 in Potsdam, where he attended school from 1948 until his matriculation in 1960. His biology teacher encouraged him to collect fossils from the glacial drift, igniting his interest in palaeontology. Before beginning his university study in 1960/61 he worked as a scientific volunteer at the Central Geological Institute in Berlin, where he was mainly dealing with microfossil processing. In August 1961 he enrolled for Geology at the Humboldt University in Berlin where he first discovered his interest in vertebrate palaeontology. Wolf-Dieter Heinrich agreed to work on Miocene otoliths from Hohen Woos in South-west Mecklenburg (North-eastern Germany), under the supervision of the late Kurt Diebel (a micropalaeontologist in the Museum fu ¨r Naturkunde Berlin).