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Melchior Neumayr

1911 Encyclopedia Britannica

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MELCHIOR NEUMAYR (1845-1890), German palaeontologist, was born at Munich on the 24th of October 1845, the son of Max von Neumayr, a Bavarian Minister of State. He was educated in the university of Munich, and completed his studies at Heidelberg, where he graduated Ph.D. After some experience in field-geology under C. W. von Giimbel he joined the Austrian geological survey in 1868. Four years later he returned to Heidelberg, but in 1873 he was appointed professor of palaeontology in Vienna, and occupied this post until his death on the 29th of January 1890. His more detailed researches related to the Jurassic and Cretaceous Ammonites and to the Tertiary freshwater mollusca; and in these studies he sought to trace the descent of the species. He dealt also with the zones of climate during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods, and endeavoured to show that the equatorial marine fauna differed from that of the two temperate zones, and the latter from that of the arctic zone, much as the faunas of similar zones differ from each other in the present day; see his "Uber klimatische Zonen wahrend der Jura and Kreidezeit" ( Denkschr. K. Akad. Wiss. Wien, 1883); he was author also of Erdgeschichte (2 vols., 1887); and Die Stamme des Thierreiches (vol. I only, 1889).

Obituary by Dr W. T. Blanford in Quart. Journ. Geol. Soc. (1890).