Hermann von Meyer and his Archaeopteryx

PART 1 Thomas Jefferson and his Ground Sloth fav.me/d7g6m1e  

PART 2 Mary Anning and her Ichthyosaur fav.me/d7ybszx

PART 3 Charles Darwin and his Toxodon fav.me/d80hum8

PART 4 Gideon Mantell and his Iguanodon fav.me/d826xjg

PART 5 William Buckland and his Megalosaur fav.me/d83zg9s

PART 6 Hermann von Meyer and his Archaeopteryx

PART 7 Georges Cuvier and his Mastodon fav.me/d88cp56 

PART 8 Edward D. Cope and his Dimetrodon fav.me/d89umu9

PART 9 Othniel C. Marsh and his Triceratops fav.me/d8bp0tr

PART 10 Eduard Suess and his Struthiosaurus fav.me/d8e0aqc

PART 11 Richard Owen and his Gorgonops fav.me/d8g9cbf

PART 12 Johann Blumenbach and his Megaloceros fav.me/d8if1nn

PART 13 Barbara Rawdon-Hastings and her Diplocynodon fav.me/d8ks10o

PART 14 Wilhelm Lund and his Smilodon fav.me/d8lk4x6

PART 15 Lawrence Lambe and his Edmontosaurus fav.me/d8s02lr

PART 16 Edmond Hebert and his Gastornis fav.me/d90r8ay

PART 17 Joseph Leidy and his Direwolf fav.me/d9598c5

PART 18 Barnum Brown and his T-Rex fav.me/d977xsf

PART 19 Immanuel Walch and his Trilobites fav.me/d9a1qc9

Guten Tag, kleines Vögelchen!

Christian Erich Hermann von Meyer is credited for introducing Vertebrate Paleontology to Germany; he was the son of Johann Friedrich von Meyer, who is famous for translating the Bible. Hermann was born in 1801 in Frankfurt and later studied natural sciences in Heidelberg.

 He studied and named several creatures from the Triassic and Jurassic including Plateosaurus and Rhamphorynchus. His most famous contribution to science however was the naming of Archaeopteryx – which is the earliest bird known to science.

The first fossil find of this pigeon-sized bird from the late Jurassic was the impression of a single feather from a stone quarry in Solnhofen uncovered in 1860. Today one half of the imprint lies in Berlin, the other in Munich. The funny thing is, a complete skeleton was already found in 1855 – five years earlier than the feather… only Hermann mistook it for a Pterodactylus 

To this day 11 complete skeletons of Archaeopteryx were found, the most famous is the “Berlin Exemplar”.  upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia…

I based my drawing of Hermann von Meyer on this portrait:

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia…

Background fav.me/d4m9m1v