Hans Edmund Wolters (11 February 1915 – 22 December 1991) was a German

ornithologist Ornithology is a branch of zoology that concerns the "methodological study and consequent knowledge of birds with all that relates to them." Several aspects of ornithology differ from related disciplines, due partly to the high visibility and th ...

from

Duisburg Duisburg () is a city in the Ruhr metropolitan area of the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Lying on the confluence of the Rhine and the Ruhr rivers in the center of the Rhine-Ruhr Region, Duisburg is the 5th largest city in Nor ...

. In 1960, he became an associate member of the Alexander Koenig Zoological Research Institute and Museum in

Bonn The federal city of Bonn ( lat, Bonna) is a city on the banks of the Rhine in the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia, with a population of over 300,000. About south-southeast of Cologne, Bonn is in the southernmost part of the Rhine-Ruhr r ...

. He became head of the museum's Department of Ornithology in 1973. He was one of the first European ornithologists to use a

cladistic Cladistics (; ) is an approach to biological classification in which organisms are categorized in groups (" clades") based on hypotheses of most recent common ancestry. The evidence for hypothesized relationships is typically shared derived char ...

classification. This is reflected in his main work ''Die Vogelarten der Erde'' (The Bird Taxa of the World).

References

1915 births 1991 deaths German ornithologists People from Duisburg People from the Rhine Province 20th-century German zoologists {{ornithologist-stub