Otto Jaekel


Otto Max Johannes Jaekel was a German paleontologist and geologist.
Jaekel was born in Neusalz, Prussian Silesia. He studied geology and paleontology in Liegnitz. After graduating in 1883, he moved to Breslau and studied under Ferdinand Roemer until 1885. Karl von Zittel awarded a PhD to Jaekel in Munich in 1886. Between 1887 and 1889, Jaekel was an assistant of E.W. Benecke at the Geologisch-Paläontologisches Institut in Straßburg, where he received his Habilitation. He worked at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Berlin and at the Geologisch-Paläontologisches Museum from 1894. Jaekel was considered as an ordinary professor of geology at the University of Vienna in 1903, but this was blocked by intrigue. Between 1906 and 1928, Jaekel was a professor at the University of Greifswald, where he founded the German Paleontological Society in 1912. He described a second species of Plateosaurus in 1914.
During World War I, in which he served as a Hauptmann in the 210th Prussian Infantry Regiment, he attempted to re-start excavations at the southern Belgian town of Bernissart, where several dozen specimens of the dinosaur Iguanodon had been dug up in the 1870s. Although he eventually succeeded in persuading the German occupation authorities to support his initiative, the attempt had to be abandoned after the German army surrendered in November 1918.
After his retirement in Greifswald, Otto Jaekel accepted a position at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou in 1928. He died after a short and unexpected illness in the German Hospital in Beijing.
As a paleontologist, Jaekel specialized in the study of fossil vertebrates, particularly fishes and reptiles. However, 27 of his publications were about echinodermata. In addition, he wrote about politics, literature and art. He was an accomplished painter, and used his skills to produce landscape paintings that illustrate the geology of the Pomeranian coast.

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