Manfred Reichel

Manfred Reichel ( born July 8, 1896 in Thielle- Wavre, today the municipality of La Tène, † November 21, 1984 in Riehen ) was a Swiss zoologist and palaeontologist micro specializing in foraminifera.

Life

Reichel was originally German (his father was director of the boarding school of the Moravians in Montmirail ), but grew after the death of his parents by his uncle in Neuchâtel, where he was naturalized in 1913. He remained all his life his home to the city of Neuchâtel connected and also spoke French preferred. He began there early for nature to interest, supported by the fact that his uncle was an ornithologist, and was a member of a circle of friends Amies de la Nature, which also belonged to Jean Piaget. He attended from 1916 to 1918 at the Ecole des Beaux -Arts in Geneva, where he took drawing lessons, and studied from 1918 natural sciences, particularly zoology at the University of Neuchâtel, with the licentiate 's degree in 1922. 1926 he became a PhD at Otto Fuhrmann in Zoology with a thesis on a blind Brazilian catfish, which received an award from the University. From 1928 he was an assistant at the Institute of Geology and Paleontology, University of Basel, and from 1933 he was a lecturer and took over the teaching of invertebrate paleontology. In the late 1920s he came by the petroleum geologists August Tobler in Basel Micropaleontology, especially the foraminifera, which are in the petroleum exploration for Feinstratigraphie of great importance. In particular, he devoted himself to the morphology of large foraminifera, especially the Alveolinen the Cretaceous and Cenozoic. 1936/37, he published his monograph on the Alveolinen in the Mémoires de la Société suisse paléontologique whose complex structure he recorded in numerous drawings. In addition to the Alveolinen he was also involved in the Orbitolina and especially the fusulinids. His courses on micropaleontology, which he held from 1935 were also attended by students from other Swiss universities. In 1940 he was in Basel, the first Professor of Paleontology of the University, and in 1955 a personal chair. He also gave courses in 1956-1962 micropalaeontology on behalf of UNESCO in Athens. After the retirement in Basel his student Lukas Hottinger there in 1966 his successor.

He was a good draftsman, what particular zugutekam him in the study of complex case of foraminifera, but come from him also reconstruction drawings of Archaeopteryx. He published alongside work on foraminifera also on the flight mechanics of bats, birds (he was an enthusiastic ornithologist ) and pterosaurs, which he studied with Ferdinand Broili in Munich in 1935. For his lectures he built a pterosaur model from wood with 6 m span.

He showed a sudden faunal foraminifera at the turn in the Cretaceous / Tertiary first. In 1983 he was honorary president of the 2nd Symposium on marine foraminifera in Pau.

In 1957 he became an honorary doctorate from the University of Dijon.