Zittel Medal

The Zittel Medal is awarded by the Paläontologische Gesellschaft to non-professional persons working in palaeontology who have made a significant contribution to the discipline and is named after Karl Alfred von Zittel.

The Paläontologische Gesellschaft thus acknowledges the importance of private collectors and amateur palaeontologists, who in many areas of research advance the subject as a whole through their private commitment.

Karl Alfred von Zittel, the son of the Protestant priest Carl Zittel, studied geology and medicine at the University of Heidelberg under Heinrich Georg Bronn, among others. Zittel received his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg in 1860. In the same year he undertook a research trip to Scandinavia and from 1861 he studied in Paris, where he was particularly interested in the research results of Georges Cuvier and Jean-Baptiste Lamarck.

In 1862 Zittel went to the Geologische Reichsanstalt Wien, where he participated in the geological mapping of Dalmatia and became an assistant to the Court Mineral Cabinet in Vienna. In 1863 he habilitated in Vienna for geology and palaeontology, in the same year he became a private lecturer at the University of Vienna and finally professor of mineralogy and geognosy at the Polytechnic in Karlsruhe.

In 1866 he took over what was then the only chair of palaeontology in Germany at the University of Munich as successor to Albert Oppel. With his work in Munich, Zittel made a decisive contribution to the development of palaeontology into an independent university discipline: from 1873 to 1874 he accompanied Gerhard Rohlfs' expedition to the Libyan Desert, the scientific results of which he published in his work (1880) and (1883).

In 1880, he also became full professor of geology at the University of Munich and director of the Natural History Museum of the Bavarian capital, and from 1869 until his death he published the journal Palaeontographica, which had been founded in 1846 by Wilhelm Dunker and Hermann von Meyer.