Gustav Tornier


Gustav Tornier was a German zoologist and herpetologist.

Life and career

Tornier was born in the Kingdom of Prussia as the eldest child of Gottlob Adolf Tornier, a member of the Prussian landed gentry in Dombrowken, a small village near Bromberg in West Prussia. His father and mother had both died by 1877, leaving the nineteen-year-old Gustav as the master of a house and estate.
The attached commitments kept him from commencing his university studies until the relatively advanced age of twenty-four. Enrolling at the university of Heidelberg in 1882, Tornier took his time, and he did not receive his doctorate for another ten years. In the meantime he wrote a monograph on evolution in support of Wilhelm Roux, Der Kampf mit der Nahrung. In the book, he took an uncompromisingly Darwinist stance, and applied the principles of natural selection and adaptation to the structures and functions of individual organisms.
In 1891 he had already accepted a post as an assistant in the zoological museum of the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. Initially he occupied himself with preparing anatomical specimens, but from 1893 he also worked in the herpetological department. When its curator, Paul Matschie, took over the mammal collection in 1895, Tornier succeeded him.
In 1902, he became professor of zoology at the university, whilst later also accepting the post of head librarian at the museum, assistant director of the museum, and finally director ad interim of the museum. In addition, he served as a board member of the Berlin Society of Friends of Natural Science from 1907 to 1924, and as such was closely involved with organizing the Tendaguru Expedition, still the largest dinosaur excavation expedition in history.
Tornier retired in October 1923, and died in 1938 in Berlin. He was interred in the Luisenfriedhof-III in Berlin-Charlottenburg.

Research

Tornier's research interests focused on amphibians and reptiles, developmental anatomy, and systematics. He became the leading authority on the reptilian and amphibian fauna of German East Africa.

''Diplodocus''

Perhaps unfairly, Tornier's legacy has mainly been determined by his position in the controversy surrounding the posture of the sauropod dinosaur Diplodocus carnegiei. Following the 1899 discovery of the animal in Wyoming, it had traditionally been depicted and mounted in an elephant-like stance. However, In 1909, Oliver P. Hay imagined two Diplodocus, being reptiles after all, with splayed lizard-like limbs on the banks of a river. Hay argued that Diplodocus had a sprawling, lizard-like gait with widely splayed legs. Tornier had independently arrived at the same conclusion and forcefully supported Hay's argument, but the hypothesis was contested by W. J. Holland, who maintained that a sprawling Diplodocus would have needed a trench to pull its belly through.
Tornier's acerbic and sometimes sarcastic reply to Holland led to a minor spat, with German authorities coming down on the former's side and even considering re-mounting the Berlin copy of Diplodocus, placed there only a few years before by Holland, in a more "reptilian" fashion. In the end, however, finds of sauropod footprints in the 1930s put Hay and Tornier's theory to rest.

Taxonomy

, Litoria tornieri, which is an Australian endemic, was named after him, as was a large sauropod dinosaur found around 1910 in the Tendaguru formations of German East Africa, Tornieria africanus.
Also, Tornier is commemorated in the scientific names of two species of African reptiles: a snake, Crotaphopeltis tornieri; and a tortoise, Malacochersus tornieri.

Selected publications