Baur, Georg

Georg Baur is a German paleontologist and zoologist.

Baur was the son of the future director of the Forestry Research Institute in Munich, Franz von Baur (at the time of the birth of Baur, he was the chief forester) and nephew of Gustav Baur. He grew up in a forester's house in Hohenheim near Stuttgart . From 1873 to 1877, he attended a real school in Stuttgart, and then studied natural sciences in Hohenheim, Munich and Leipzig, including with Karl Alfred von Zittel . In 1879, he was active in the student corps of Franconia in Munich.

In 1882, he received his doctorate in Munich ^[4] , and then was an assistant to Karl Wilhelm von Kupfer . In 1884 he married and became an assistant to Otniel Marsh at Yale University , remaining until 1890 when it came to conflict with Marsh (Baur was a fan of Edward Cope ). After collecting fish and reptile fossils for Zittel in western Kansas, he became a lecturer in comparative osteology and paleontology at Clark University . He wrote a monograph on North American turtles and undertook an expedition to the Galapagos Islands in 1891 with rich botanical and zoological material, the assessment of which took him a long time. In 1892, he became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago. There, he organized a paleontology department and embarked on an expedition to collect fossils in Wyoming, while E. Case collected in Texas. In 1897, he fell ill with a nervous breakdown (paralysis) and went on vacation to Europe (Munich, South Tyrol), but this did not bring any improvement. He died in a sanatorium and was buried in Munich.

He was a neo-Lamarquist , a conviction that he had already upheld in his dissertation and which he had not given up, but rather, which was reinforced by the study of island populations. He was considered a leading specialist in reptiles and their skeleton, both fossil and modern species. He was less interested in describing new species than in comparative studies of the structure of the skeleton and the conclusions that were drawn on the basis of kinship and genealogy. He wrote about 140 treatises, often in American Naturalist or Zoologischer Anzeiger and in a concise, concise form. He was of the opinion that dinosaurs do not form a closed group, but belong to three groups of archosaurs that have little in common with each other ^[5] . Tailless and tailed amphibians (Batrachia), he considered the descendants of coelacanthous , and not bisexual (Dipnoi).

From the study of animals and plants of the Galapagos Islands and, in particular, the diversity of fauna on various neighboring islands (he specially studied the lizards of the Tropidurus genus), he came to the conclusion that they were once connected with the mainland of Central America ( Charles Darwin suggested the volcanic origin of the islands and populating their animals from the mainland). He then distributed this version to other islands in the Pacific.

He distinguished the family of reptiles Mixosauridae , genus Mixosaurus (1887), the infraorder Nothosauroidea (1889), and the families Nothosauridae and Pistosauridae . He described subspecies of the Galapagos tortoise ( Chelonides nigra ). Several species of reptiles are named after Baur: Kinosternon baurii , Phyllodactylus baurii , Terrapene carolina bauri ^{[6] [7] [8]} .