A tribute to Burkart Engesser

Abstract

Burkart Engesser is one the most renowned specialists onCenozoic rodents and insectivores worldwide. His career aspalaeontologist started 50 years ago as he entered theNatural History Museum Basel (NMB) in 1962 to work asassistant of Johannes Hu¨rzeler. This period lasted until1968 when he decided to undertake a PhD thesis under thesupervision of Hu¨rzeler who was then head of theDepartment of Osteology at the NMB and honorary lec-turer at the University of Basel. He studied the famousMiddle Miocene locality of Anwil located in the vicinity ofBasel. Burkart then started to be interested in small animalsbecause the rich locality mainly yielded tiny teeth, whichhe started to fall in love with. There is indeed an impal-pable emotion in bringing tens of millimetre-sized speciesback to life that are extracted from tons of sedimentsthrough the hard and time-consuming collecting-sieving-picking process. He became Doctor in Zoology in 1971 andhis seminal work was published in a regional Swiss journala year later. His talents as scientific illustrator becamewidely known as he illustrated the hundreds of teeth him-self, with incredible accuracy and remarkable aesthetics.Right after this, he was invited to the United States, atthe Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh as a visiting museumspecialist for 9 months. There he further developed hisfield experience in various regions and met several mam-mal specialists including the curator for vertebrates, Dr.Mary Dawson, who participates in this volume.After coming back to Basel, he had the chance to takeover the curator position at the NMB after Hu¨rzeler’sretirement until his own retirement in 2007. His Museumwork includes research, for which he dedicated a large partof his time publishing more than 50 papers in variousjournals including the most prestigious ones. His contri-butions cover the fields of systematics, phylogeny, bio-chronology or palaeoecology mostly of the Europeancontinent and the Swiss Alpine foreland basin, but severalarticles and monographs also deal with faunas of the NewWorld and Asia (see publication list below). But Museumwork is also about conservation, in which he involvedhimself in keeping a high collection standard and in greatlyenriching the collection inherited from his famous prede-cessors Ru¨timeyer, Stehlin, Schaub and Hu¨rzeler amongothers. This enlargement is barely visible since tens ofthousands of teeth of rodents and insectivores take only acouple of compactor columns in the vast collection, thetons of sediments he brought to Basel being now washedaway, probably by the Rhine River! Working in collectionsalso means that you meet colleagues from the whole world,and this is the part Burkart always preferred. Most of thecontributing authors of this volume met him in the ‘‘Bun-ker’’ of the NMB (for those who do not know the expres-sion, it is a typical Swiss bomb shelter to protect scientificgoods) and developed projects with him while discussingbiochronology or systematics. Besides research and