Curt Teichert

Curt Teichert (May 8, 1905 in Königsberg, East Prussia – May 10, 1996 in Arlington, Virginia) was a German-American palaeontologist and geologist, noted for his contributions to geology, paleozoic stratigraphy and paleontology, Cephalopoda, ancient and modern reefs, and correlation, the matching of strata of the same age in different locations.

He studied geology at universities in Munich, Freiburg and Königsberg, receiving his Ph.D. degree from Albertus University in Königsberg in 1928. The same year he married Gertrud Kaufmann, daughter of Walter Kaufmann, a physics professor in Königsberg, and sister to Rudolf Kaufmann, the tragically short-lived palaeontologist. He was appointed as assistant at Freiburg from where he went to Washington to study cephalopods on a one-year Rockefeller Foundation award in 1930. In 1931-32 he took part as geologist in a Danish expedition to Greenland. With the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s, he was advised by the University to divorce his wife as she had a Jewish ancestry. The couple hastily left for Copenhagen in 1933, and eked out a living there for the next four years.

A Carnegie Foundation grant in 1937 enabled the Teicherts to settle in Australia where Curt had been offered a position at the University of Western Australia in Perth. Here he was the only palaeontologist in a vast and unexplored fossil-rich area. With the outbreak of World War II the Teicherts were interned by the authorities, and were later offered a trip back to Germany in exchange for Australian prisoners of war, an offer which was politely declined. The position as research lecturer at Perth lasted from 1937 to 1945. During the war years he investigated reefs from a naval shipping point of view, and was a consultant to Caltex Oil in their search for oil in Western Australia.

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