Charles University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic
Reuss completed his secondary schooling at the University of Prague, where he studied philosophy, science, and medicine from 1825 to 1833, receiving his Doctor of Medicine degree on 10 November 1833.
Career
Gallery of August von Reuss
August Emanuel Rudolph von Reuss (8 July 1811 in Bílina, Bohemia – 26 November 1873 in Vienna), Austrian geologist and palaeontologist.
Charles University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic
Reuss completed his secondary schooling at the University of Prague, where he studied philosophy, science, and medicine from 1825 to 1833, receiving his Doctor of Medicine degree on 10 November 1833.
August Emanuel Rudolph von Reuss was a prominent Austrian geologist and paleontologist who specialized in micropaleontology. He is noted for being among the first to practice “applied micropaleontology,” an approach that has played an important role since the I920’s in petroleum geology. He was also the first to use Foraminifera to determine the age of Tertiary deposits.
Background
August Emanuel Rudolph von Reuss was born on July 8, 1811, in Bilin, Bohemia, the son of Franz Ambrosius Reuss. Reuss’s father was a physician at Bilin, a spa in northern Bohemia. His mother's name was Katharina Scheithauer, the daughter of the manager of an estate in the vicinity.
Education
Since Reuss’s father was a serious student of geology and mineralogy who contributed considerably to the geological exploration of Bohemia, he tutored his son in these subjects and also in the standard curriculum. Reuss completed his secondary schooling at the University of Prague, where he studied philosophy, science, and medicine from 1825 to 1833, receiving his Doctor of Medicine degree on 10 November 1833.
After receiving his Doctor of Medicine degree in 1833 and following his father's death, Reuss took over the medical practice in Bílina. In his free time, however, he studied mineralogy, geology, and paleontology; and as early as 1837 he was able to report his first mineralogical and geological findings in northern Bohemia to the Vereinigung der Naturforscher in Prague. These findings inspired him to continue his research, and in 1849 he accepted the chair of mineralogy of the University of Prague. Thus he could give up his medical practice and devote himself entirely to science.
In 1863 Reuss was appointed a professor of mineralogy at the University of Vienna, where he remained until his death. He accepted this post (as he had done at Prague) even though his principal areas of research were paleontology and stratigraphy - until the middle of the nineteenth century there were no chairs in paleontology, and geology and mineralogy still constituted a single field.
During the last years of his life, Reuss was forced because of ill health to curtail his academic activities. Thereafter he published under the name of A. E. Ritter von Reuss.
In his first publications Reuss treated topics related to the geology and mineralogy of the region around Bilin; in fact, some sixty titles, just over half of his total production, were devoted to this, his native region. His interests soon turned to paleontology, however, the subject to which he made his greatest contribution. In the monograph Die Versteinerungen der bohmischen Kreide-Forination (1845-1846) he described and illustrated 776 species in fifty-one tables, arranged according to their stratigraphic occurrence. Even in this early work, which is still useful, he devoted particular attention to the micro-fossils (particularly Foraminifera and Ostracoda).
Reuss was most interested in the Foraminifera of the Cretaceous and, particularly, of the Tertiary. In his monographs, he enlarged a number of genera and groups (Peneroplidae, Lagenidae, and Ataxophragmium) and provided numerous descriptions of Foraminifera from various levels of the Cretaceous and Tertiary in northern and central Germany, Austria, and Belgium. His work contributed to an understanding of their taxonomy and biostratigraphy and exhibited many facts relating to their paleoecology and biogeography.
The classification of Foraminifera that Reuss proposed in 1861-1862 greatly influenced research on this order for decades, although his scheme is now considered to be an artificial one. He divided the fossil Foraminifera into twenty-one families encompassing 109 genera, arranged in accordance with the following criteria: the presence or absence of pores in the shell walls (Perforata, Imperforata); the composition and structure of the casing shell; the shell form; and disposition of the chambers.
Reuss’s studies covered a wide variety of topics: the stratigraphy of the Silurian near Prague; coprolites, Foraminifera, and Ostracoda of the Permian in Bohemia and Germany; corals and crabs of the Alpine Triassic; Bryozoa, corals, sponges, crabs, and snails of the Polish, Moravian, and Alpine Jurassic; and fishes and many invertebrate groups of the Cretaceous, not only of Bohemia but also from deposits in Poland, the Austrian Alps, and northern Germany.
His studies of the Tertiary invertebrates were similarly wide-ranging, covering Foraminifera, corals. Bryozoa, mollusks, Ostracoda, and decapods, and including stratigraphic observations of the Tertiary in Bohemia, the Vienna and Mainz basins, the Austrian Alps, northern and central Germany, Galicia, Bessarabia, Hungary, and the Antwerp region. These investigations of marine invertebrates and the associated stratigraphic problems were supplemented by research on the Tertiary freshwater deposits of Bohemia and the fauna contained in them, especially mollusks.
Personality
Physical Characteristics:
At the end of his life, Reuss suffered from a lung hemorrhage, which caused a fatal outcome for him.
Connections
On 16 February 1841 Reuss married Anna Schubert, who also came from Bilin; they had two sons and three daughters. One of his sons was a prominent ophthalmologist August Leopold von Reuss (1841–1924).