RG Vertebrate Paleontology

First the working group met during the annual meetings of the Paläontologische Gesellschaft. Since 1976, independent meetings have been held every spring, usually on a weekend in March from Friday noon to Sunday noon. The meeting place changed in order to distribute the efforts of a long journey evenly. In earlier years every second symposium could take place at the Reisensburg near Günzburg. When the number of participants exceeded 100, this very nice tradition had to be abandoned. In order to offer a lot of time for discussions and personal conversations besides the conference program, conference venues are selected as far away from large cities as possible.

Initially, the working group was strongly focused on mammals and especially on their dentition, as this was the main field of employment. The application in biostratography played a major role in this. The clarification of the terrestrial biostratigraphy of the Southern German Tertiary would certainly not have been so successful without the contacts in the working group - intensive, often heated discussions regularly took place on questions of evolution as well as functional reconstruction. Prof. Gutmann from Frankfurt played an important role in this. - Zoologist Prof. J. Niethammer from Bonn, Germany, regularly attended the meetings and opened the view to the zoological aspects of vertebrate palaeontology. In the first years, access to meetings was kept somewhat restrictive. Participants should have a doctorate in order to keep the meetings small. But the meetings proved to be the ideal opportunity to broaden one's own horizon. We've all learned from each other. Therefore, soon PhD and diploma students, and finally all those interested, could participate. However, this went beyond the scope of the Reisensburg and the meetings increasingly took on the style of conferences.

In the 80s a great interest in dinosaurs arose worldwide. Because the working group focused on mammalian topics, a second interest group was formed which dealt specifically with reptiles and met - even less formally - separately as "Palherp" since about the beginning of the 1990s. Some personal reasons may also have played a role in this separation. - At the annual meeting 2011 both groups will meet again together in Eichstätt.