Ferdinand von Roemer

Carl Ferdinand von Roemer (5 January 1818 – 14 December 1891), German geologist, had originally been educated for the legal profession at Göttingen, but became interested in geology, and abandoning law in 1840, studied science at the University of Berlin, where he graduated Ph.D. in 1842.

Two years later he published his first work, Das Rheinische Ubergangsgebirge (1844), in which he dealt with the older rocks and fossils. In 1845 he paid a visit to America, and devoted a year and a half to a careful study of the geology of Texas and other Southern states. He published at Bonn in 1849 a general work entitled Texas, while the results of his investigations of the Cretaceous rocks and fossils were published three years later in a treatise, Die Kreidebildungen von Texas und ihre organischen Einschlusse (1852), which also included a general account of the geology, and gained for him the title Father of the geology of Texas.

Subsequently, he published at Breslau Die Silurische Fauna des westlichen Tennessee (1860). During the preparation of these works he was from 1847 to 1855 privatdocent at Bonn, and was then appointed professor of geology, palaeontology and mineralogy in the University of Breslau, a post which he held with signal success as a teacher until his death.