The new book opens up as yet unpublished diaries and other documents from Dolf Seilacher´s youth and gives insight how he matured from a young collector of Muschelkalk and Keuper fossils of his home area to a renowned palaeontologist. Essays about Seilacher´s life and work and his collecting area in Southwest Germany from a present viewpoint are added.
February 24, 2025 was the 100th anniversary of the Tübingen and Yale palaeontologist Adolf (Dolf) Seilacher. For this occasion, the new book commemorates this renowned scientist. It contains two diaries written by the young Seilacher. In the 1940 diary he kept records about his collecting trips in the Triassic of his South German home area and how he encountered palaeontologists and geologists in museums and university departments. In the 1944 diary he wrote about his experience during his training in the German Navy at the 'Marineschule Mürwik' near Flensburg. Moreover, added is a paper dealing with the vertebrate and invertebrate fauna of the Gaildorf Bed, written in 1941 but as yet unpublished. His notes illustrate how he started as a young fossil collector who developed palaeontological ideas and built networks with the scientific community of this time in Germany. The book is complemented by his vita and an introduction to the Triassic outcrops of his collecting trips. A glossary explains palaeontological and stratigraphical terms. The book covering 270 pages and 168 illustrations is written in German.