Johann Andreas Wagner (21 March 1797 – 17 December 1861) was a German

palaeontologist Paleontology (), also spelled palaeontology or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). It includes the study of foss ...

zoologist Zoology ()The pronunciation of zoology as is usually regarded as nonstandard, though it is not uncommon. is the branch of biology that studies the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and d ...

and

archaeologist Archaeology or archeology is the scientific study of human activity through the recovery and analysis of material culture. The archaeological record consists of artifacts, architecture, biofacts or ecofacts, sites, and cultural landsca ...

who wrote several important works on palaeontology.

Career

Wagner was a professor at the

University of Munich The Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (simply University of Munich or LMU; german: Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München) is a public research university in Munich, Germany. It is Germany's sixth-oldest university in continuous operatio ...

, and curator of the Zoologische Staatssammlung (State Zoology Collection). He was the author of ''Die Geographische Verbreitung der Säugethiere Dargestellt'' (1844–46). Wagner was a Christian creationist.

Pikermi

In his travels to the fossil beds of Pikermi, Wagner discovered and described fossil remains of

mastodon A mastodon ( 'breast' + 'tooth') is any proboscidean belonging to the extinct genus ''Mammut'' (family Mammutidae). Mastodons inhabited North and Central America during the late Miocene or late Pliocene up to their extinction at the end of the ...

, ''

Dinotherium ''Deinotherium'' was a large elephant-like proboscidean that appeared in the Middle Miocene and survived until the Early Pleistocene. Although superficially resembling modern elephants, they had notably more flexible necks, limbs adapted to a ...

'', '' Hipparion'', two species of giraffe, antelope and others. His collaboration with Johannes Roth on these fossils became a major textbook in palaeontology, known as "Roth & Wagner", in which the "bones were much broken, and no complete skeleton was found with all the parts united".

Legacy

Wagner is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of South American snake, '' Diaphorolepis wagneri''.Beolens, Bo; Watkins, Michael; Grayson, Michael (2011). ''The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles''. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. xiii + 296 pp. . ("Wagner, J.A.", p. 278).

Bibliography

* 1844-1846. ''Die Geographische Verbreitung der Säugethiere Dargestellt''. * Johann Andreas Wagner 1897
''Monographie der gattung Pomatias Studer''

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Wagner, Johann Andreas 1797 births 1861 deaths Paleozoologists German paleontologists Archaeologists from Bavaria German curators German science writers German taxonomists 19th-century German zoologists Christian creationists Science teachers Corresponding members of the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich faculty German male non-fiction writers 19th-century German male writers Writers from Nuremberg