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Johann Jakob Kaup - A great naturalists from Darmstadt

By Ernst Probst

Johann Jakob Kaup on 20 April 1803, the illegitimate son Lieutenant Frederick Kaup was born in Darmstadt. From 1812 he attended high school, where he was a bad student. Latin and Greek, he was interested in little, the nature and especially the animal world, however, very much. After the death of his mother in 1820 he was an orphan.

Subsequently earned Johann Jakob Kaup with typing, which stood him in good handwriting benefit and the sale of stuffed birds for a living. The birds he brought a blowgun to the track. The stuffing had taught him the Oberforstrat Dr. Georg Bekker, head of the Natural History Cabinet in Darmstadt.

From 1822 Johann Jakob Kaup studied at the University of Gottingen, where the famous Naturalist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) taught zoology. After a year he moved to the University of Heidelberg, then to the Rijks Museum van Naturlijke History in Leiden (Holland), where he examined fish and amphibians.

Ludewig I. Grand Duke of Hesse and the Rhine in 1828 shared the private scholar Johann Jakob Kaup the natural history collection in Darmstadt. Kaup worked there until 1837 as "temporary staff".

in April 1829 in the publication "Sketched history and natural system of European Wildlife" presented Kaup remarkable ideas and principles, so he was one of the forerunners of the British naturalist Charles Darwin (1808-1882) holds. At that time, he acts as the sole agent of the natural history collection in Darmstadt, and received an annual bonus of 440 guilders. To supplement his modest income

, Kaup taught the sons of distinguished families. Among his students including Heinrich August Schleiermacher (later director of the museum in Darmstadt, Germany) and Carl Eigenbrodt (later the personal doctor of Louis IV). With great zeal Kaup dealt with the drawing and the processing of fossil finds.

1831 Kaup doctorate degree in philosophy. He laid the renowned French naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769-1832), the founder of vertebrate paleontology, a manuscript about fossils before. Cuvier, he donated for special praise.
asked
1832 German naturalist Heinrich Georg Bronn (1800-1862) in Heidelberg Kaup to cooperate on the "New Journal of Mineralogy, geology and fossils customer." In the aftermath Kaup attended numerous professional conferences and published articles highly regarded. In 1837 he was "real inspector at the natural history collection in Darmstadt.

1854 Kaup bought in London in 1801 in North America excavated and well-preserved skeleton of a so-called Mastodon (pachyderm) for only 1,200 guilders. 1855 he worked for three months in the fish collection at the Paris Muséum d'Histoire Naturelle "in Charles Lucien Bonaparte (1803-1857), invited the Kaup and included in his family had. Kaup had with many famous naturalists of his time close contacts. Among other things, with the London paleontologist Richard Owen (1804-1892), who coined the name dinosaur. Kaup in 1858 became a professor.

Kaup described numerous fossils. Among other things, he proposed the genus name
Deinotherium giganteum before a pachyderm from the Miocene,
Chalicotherium (1833) for a "krallenfüßiges ungulate from the Miocene
and Chirotherium (1835," hand beast ") for a country of dinosaurs from the Triassic.

On 4 July 1873 Johann Jakob Kaup died at the age of 70 in Darmstadt. The obituary Newspapers praised the Darmstadt its simple, honest and always cheerful character that earned him many friends.

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Literature:
Ernst Probst: The Ur-Rhine. Rheinhessen ten million years ago, GRIN 2009
Ernst Probst: Johann Jakob Kaup. The great naturalist from Darmstadt, GRIN 2011 (in preparation)
Jens Lorenz Franzen / Heiner Roos / Ernst Probst: The Dinotherium Museum in Eppelsheim, Eppelsheim 2009