A tribute to Burkart Engesser
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A tribute to Burkart Engesser Loı¨c Costeur • Olivier Maridet • Zhanxiang Qiu Zhuding Qiu
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Published online: 13 January 2012 Ó Akademie der Naturwissenschaften Schweiz (SCNAT) 2012
Burkart Engesser is one the most renowned specialists on Cenozoic rodents and insectivores worldwide. His career as palaeontologist started 50 years ago as he entered the Natural History Museum Basel (NMB) in 1962 to work as assistant of Johannes Hu¨rzeler. This period lasted until 1968 when he decided to undertake a PhD thesis under the supervision of Hu¨rzeler who was then head of the Department of Osteology at the NMB and honorary lecturer at the University of Basel. He studied the famous Middle Miocene locality of Anwil located in the vicinity of Basel. Burkart then started to be interested in small animals because the rich locality mainly yielded tiny teeth, which he started to fall in love with. There is indeed an impalpable emotion in bringing tens of millimetre-sized species back to life that are extracted from tons of sediments through the hard and time-consuming collecting-sievingpicking process. He became Doctor in Zoology in 1971 and his seminal work was published in a regional Swiss journal a year later. His talents as scientific illustrator became
L. Costeur (&) Naturhistorisches Museum Basel, Augustinergasse 2, 4001 Basel, Switzerland e-mail: [email protected] O. Maridet Z. Qiu Z. Qiu Key Laboratory of Evolutionary Systematics of Vertebrates, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 643, Beijing 100044, China e-mail: [email protected] Z. Qiu e-mail: [email protected] Z. Qiu e-mail: [email protected]
widely known as he illustrated the hundreds of teeth himself, with incredible accuracy and remarkable aesthetics. Right after this, he was invited to the United States, at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh as a visiting museum specialist for 9 months. There he further developed his field experience in various regions and met several mammal specialists including the curator for vertebrates, Dr. Mary Dawson, who participates in this volume. After coming back to Basel, he had the chance to take over the curator position at the NMB after Hu¨rzeler’s retirement until his own retirement in 2007. His Museum work includes research, for which he dedicated a large part of his time publishing more than 50 papers in various journals including the most prestigious ones. His contributions cover the fields of systematics, phylogeny, biochronology or palaeoecology mostly of the European continent and the Swiss Alpine foreland basin, but several articles and monographs also deal with faunas of the New World and Asia (see publication list below). But Museum work is also about conservation, in which he involved himself in keeping a high collection standard and in greatly enriching the collection inherited from his famous predecessors Ru¨timeyer, Stehlin, Schaub and Hu¨rzeler among others. This enlargement is barely visible since tens of thousands of teeth of rode
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