AASP Primary Records Program

AASP Newsletter 37(1): p. 6, 2004.

I am sorry to have to inform you that Dr. Karl Mädler passed away October 22nd, 2003. Born in 1902, his life literally spanned a century. Initially trained as a pharmacist his first professional appointment happened to be at Seifhennersdorf, a small town in Saxony which is well known to palaeobotanists for the site of a rich Oligocene flora. There he gained interest in fossil plants and applied for a doctoral thesis with Prof. Richard Kräusel at the University of Frankfurt am Main in 1931. Following Kräusel’s suggestion, he started to work on an exceptionally well preserved diverse Pliocene flora which was recovered from the construction site of the sewage treatment plant for Frankfurt (well known as "Klärbecken-Flora"). Due to unfortunate circumstances, he was not able to receive his degree at that time, but the results of his work were published as a monograph in 1939 ("Die pliozäne Flora von Frankfurt am Main") in the "Abhandlungen der Senckenbergischen Naturforschenden Gesellschaft, 446". Applying cuticular analysis to the leaves and including fruits/seeds, this is an early and still important example of a synoptic publication on a Late Neogene flora.

Following the turmoil of the war and post-war years, Karl Mädler started his permanent professional carreer as a palaeobotanist with the German Geological Survey (Hannover) in 1955. His research was now directed mainly towards application and focussed on "micropalaeobotany". This led to a number of pioneering contributions on charophytes (starting in 1953), on Mesozoic megaspores (Mädler 1955), and in Mesozoic palynology. He finally received his doctoral degree (Dr. rer nat.) in 1963 from the Technical University of Hannover with a thesis on spores and pollen from the German Triassic ("Die geologische Verbreitung von Sporen und Pollen in der Deutschen Trias") which was published in 1964 as "Beihefte zum Geologischen Jahrbuch, 65". When working on Mesozoic microfloras, he also realized the importance of remains of the microplankton (Mädler 1963, 1967, 1969) which is highlighted by his thorough study of the organic-walled phytoplankton from the Lower Jurassic Posidonia Shale (Mädler 1963, 1969). His palynological expertise was repeatedly demanded even by archaeologists for unraveling the origin of jet which was found in excavations (Mädler 1958, 1961, 1974, 1980).

Part of Karl Mädler’s later work was again devoted to macropalaeobotany and is especially documented in some monographs on Cretaceous and Tertiary angiosperm floras. He early recognized that angiosperm paleobotanists were in need of a classification for leaves (Mädler 1940, 1950, Mädler & Straus 1971), but the classification proposed by him (Mädler 1975) was never widely accepted. One of his late papers is dealing with Pliocene charophytes and was published at the age of 86.

Even at the age of 90, Karl Mädler published a Permian flora. He still regularly attended meetings of the German Palaeontological Society and the group of German-speaking palaeobotanists (APP). When asked, he still liked to help with important informations and advice from his long lasting experience. He is remembered as a modest man never really boosting himself, but he was well recognized by the community of German speaking palaeontologists. In spite of a number of pioneering contributions to palaeobotany and palynology, Karl Mädler`s international recognition regrettably always remained limited because he published his work mostly in German; only three out of his 54 publications are in English.

An appreciation of Karl Mädler was published by Benda (1996) in a special issue (200) of the "Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie Abhandlungen" at the occasion of his 95th birthday. A complete list of Karl Mädler’s publications was compiled by Heunisch & Wilde (2003) for the APP-Rundbrief which can be found on the internet (www.uni-muenster.de/GeoPalaeontologie/Palaeo/Palbot/apptext.htm). The attached photograph of Karl Mädler in his garden at the age of 80 is from private sources and was passed on by C. Heunisch. W. Riegel has to be acknowledged for commenting the text of this obituary.