Karl David Wilhelm Mayer-Eymar (29 July 1826 – 25 February 1907) was a Franco-Swiss paleontologist and geologist known for his work on classifying the stratigraphy of the

Tertiary Tertiary ( ) is a widely used but obsolete term for the geologic period from 66 million to 2.6 million years ago. The period began with the demise of the non-avian dinosaurs in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, at the start ...

into 12 stages. He was born Karl Mayer but added the anagram Eymar around 1865 to distinguish his name from others, and the nickname "Tertiary Mayer" was also used. He was a major collector of fossils and described many molluscs. Son of a Swiss businessman Carl Friederich Mayer and Elisabeth Maria Fraziska Kunkler, he was born in Marseilles and was educated at Renne and St Gall before going to the

University of Zurich The University of Zürich (UZH, german: Universität Zürich) is a public research university located in the city of Zürich, Switzerland. It is the largest university in Switzerland, with its 28,000 enrolled students. It was founded in 1833 f ...

in 1846. He then worked at the

Museum d'Histoire Naturelle The French National Museum of Natural History, known in French as the ' (abbreviation MNHN), is the national natural history museum of France and a ' of higher education part of Sorbonne Universities. The main museum, with four galleries, is loc ...

at Paris under Charles Henry Dessalines d'Orbigny. He moved to the Zurich Polytechnische Hochschule in 1858 and became a curator of the collections, becoming a professor in 1875. In 1857 he published his most influential work ''Versuch einer neuen Klassifikation der Tertiär-Gebilde Europas'' (An Attempt at a New Classification of the Tertiary Formations of Europe) in which he classified the European Tertiary into 12 stages of which the Bartonian, Aquitanian, Tortonian, Astian, and Piacenzian still continue to be in use. His collections are held in ETH-Zurich.

References

External links

Karl Mayer-Eymar and Barton-On-Sea

{{DEFAULTSORT:Mayer-Eymar, Karl 1826 births 1907 deaths 19th-century Swiss geologists Scientists from Marseille