PALAEONTOLOGY[online]

Tag: Christian Klug

Christian Klug (curator of the Palaeontological Museum of the University of Zurich, Switzerland) grew up in southern Germany. Already at the age of 10, he became interested in nature, particularly botany and geology. Some years later, he began collecting Triassic fossils in the area around his hometown Schwaebisch Hall (Germany). After school, he studied palaeontology in Tuebingen. Both his MSc- and his PhD-thesis focused on Devonian ammonoids based on materials from Morocco. After a scientific internship at the Staatliches Museum fuer Naturkunde in Stuttgart (Germany), he received a part time position as research associate at the Palaeontological Institute and Museum of the University of Zurich. Since 2014, he has been a curator of the museum. In his research, he focuses on the palaeobiology of cephalopods and their macroecological changes in the Palaeozoic.

Contact Details:

Paläontologisches Institut und Museum, Zürich, Switzerland.

by Kenneth De Baets1, René Hoffmann2, Jocelyn A. Sessa3 and Christian Klug4. Introduction: Ammonoids (Ammonoidea) are an extinct group of marine invertebrates with an external shell. They were cephalopods, and hence closely related to modern cuttlefish, squid, octopuses and the pearly nautilus. In a non-scientific context, they are commonly called ammonites, but that term really includes only Jurassic and Cretaceous forms in its stricter scientific sense. The Ammonoidea as a whole lived from the Early Devonian to the earliest Palaeogene period, covering a timespan of about 350 million years. Normally, only their shells, also called conchs, or their internal moulds are found in the fossil record. Conchs from adult ammonoids range from about 5 millimetres to 2 metres in diameter. Due to...