Otto Heinrich Schindewolf (7 June 1896, Hanover

Hanover

Hanover or Hannover, on the river Leine, is the capital of the federal state of Lower Saxony , Germany and was once by personal union the family seat of the Hanoverian Kings of Great Britain, under their title as the dukes of Brunswick-Lüneburg...

, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 - 10 June 1971, Tübingen

Tübingen

Tübingen is a traditional university town in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated south of the state capital, Stuttgart, on a ridge between the Neckar and Ammer rivers.-Geography:...

, West Germany) was a German paleontologist who studied the evolution

Evolution

Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...

 of coral

Coral

Corals are marine animals in class Anthozoa of phylum Cnidaria typically living in compact colonies of many identical individual "polyps". The group includes the important reef builders that inhabit tropical oceans and secrete calcium carbonate to form a hard skeleton.A coral "head" is a colony of...

s and cephalopod

Cephalopod

A cephalopod is any member of the molluscan class Cephalopoda . These exclusively marine animals are characterized by bilateral body symmetry, a prominent head, and a set of arms or tentacles modified from the primitive molluscan foot...

s.

Schindewolf was on the faculty at the University of Marburg from 1919 until 1927. He then he became director of the Geological Survey of Berlin. In 1948 he became a professor at the University of Tübingen, where he retired as professor emeritus in 1964.

He was a saltationist

Saltation (biology)

In biology, ""saltation"" is a sudden change from one generation to the next, that is large, or very large, in comparison with the usual variation of an organism...

 who opposed the theory of gradual evolution, and in the 1930s suggested that major evolutionary transformations must have occurred in large leaps between species. This idea became known as the Hopeful Monster theory and was further taken and developed up by the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt

Richard Goldschmidt

Richard Benedict Goldschmidt was a German-born American geneticist. He is considered the first to integrate genetics, development, and evolution. He pioneered understanding of reaction norms, genetic assimilation, dynamical genetics, sex determination, and heterochrony...

 in the 1940s. Schindewolf was also the first to suggest, in 1950, that mass extinctions might have been caused by extraterrestrial impact

Impact event

An impact event is the collision of a large meteorite, asteroid, comet, or other celestial object with the Earth or another planet. Throughout recorded history, hundreds of minor impact events have been reported, with some occurrences causing deaths, injuries, property damage or other significant...

s or nearby supernova

Supernova

A supernova is a stellar explosion that is more energetic than a nova. It is pronounced with the plural supernovae or supernovas. Supernovae are extremely luminous and cause a burst of radiation that often briefly outshines an entire galaxy, before fading from view over several weeks or months...

. From 1948 until his retirement in 1964, Schindewolf was professor of Geology and Paleontology at the University of Tübingen.

External links

• (17 December 1938). "Handbuch der Paläozoologie". Nature 142: 1057 doi:10.1038/1421057a0 - review of the book.