Karl Holdhaus was an Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n entomologist who specialised in Coleoptera.
He was Director of the Vienna Natural History Museum

Naturhistorisches Museum

The Naturhistorisches Museum Wien or NHMW is a large museum located in Vienna, Austria.The collections displayed cover , and the museum has a website providing an overview as a video virtual tour....

.

Holdhaus worked on the Coleoptera of glacial refugia, postglacial range expansions and “Massifs de Refugium”. He recognised that the distribution of blind euedaphic and troglobitic beetles is restricted to a well definable area in Europe, south of a line connecting Bordeaux

Bordeaux

Bordeaux is a port city on the Garonne River in the Gironde department in southwestern France.The Bordeaux-Arcachon-Libourne metropolitan area, has a population of 1,010,000 and constitutes the sixth-largest urban area in France. It is the capital of the Aquitaine region, as well as the prefecture...

, Lyon

Lyon

Lyon , is a city in east-central France in the Rhône-Alpes region, situated between Paris and Marseille. Lyon is located at from Paris, from Marseille, from Geneva, from Turin, and from Barcelona. The residents of the city are called Lyonnais....

, the southern Alps

Alps

The Alps is one of the great mountain range systems of Europe, stretching from Austria and Slovenia in the east through Italy, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Germany to France in the west....

, the Carpathians and the Black Sea

Black Sea

The Black Sea is bounded by Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus and is ultimately connected to the Atlantic Ocean via the Mediterranean and the Aegean seas and various straits. The Bosphorus strait connects it to the Sea of Marmara, and the strait of the Dardanelles connects that sea to the Aegean...

. This is the “Holdhaus line” - the northern distribution limit of beetles with very poor powers of dispersal, especially blind cave beetles. Only two small areas with blind beetles are known north of this line the Jura

Jura mountains

The Jura Mountains are a small mountain range located north of the Alps, separating the Rhine and Rhone rivers and forming part of the watershed of each...

 and the Northeastern Alps).Also South of this line there are many endemic animal and These areas are the “Massifs de Refugium” of Chodat & Pampanini (1902).

Selected works

• 1920 Koleopteren aus Mesopotamien. Ann. Naturh. Mus. Wien, 33 (1919): 39-58.

• 1923 Elenco dei Coleotteri dell'isola d' Elba
  Elba
  Elba is a Mediterranean island in Tuscany, Italy, from the coastal town of Piombino. The largest island of the Tuscan Archipelago, Elba is also part of the National Park of the Tuscan Archipelago and the third largest island in Italy after Sicily and Sardinia...
  
  , con studii suI problemo della Tirennida. Mem. Soc. ent. ital., 2, 1: 76-112, 2: 113-176.

• with Carl. H. Lindroth, 1940. Die europäischen Koleopteren mit boreoalpiner Verbreitung. Ann. Nat. Mus. Wien 50: 123-293.

• 1954 Die Spuren der Eiszeit in der Tierwelt Europas. Abh. zool.-bot. Ges., 18: 1-493.

Also in book form as Die Spuren der Eiszeit in der Tierwelt Europas. 1-493. Wagner, Innsbruck.(same year)

• with Deubel F. 1910.Untersuchungen über die Zoogeographie der Karpathen (unter besonderer Berucksichtigung der Coleopteren). Abh. zool.-bot. Ges. Wien, 6, 1: 1-202.