Ferdinand Stoliczka

Ferdinand Stoliczka (Czech written Stolička, June 7, 1838 – June 19, 1874) was a Moravian palaeontologist who worked in India on paleontology, geology and various aspects of zoology, including ornithology, Malacology and herpetology. He died of high altitude sickness during an expedition across the Himalayas.

Stoliczka was born at the lodge Zámeček near Kroměříž in Moravia. Stoliczka, whose father was a forester who took care of the estate of the Archbishop of Olomouc, studied at a German Secondary school in Kromeriz. Although Stoliczka published 79 articles from 1859–1875, he never wrote anything in Czech. It is believed that he spoke German at home. In his Calcutta years he was an important figure in the German-speaking community there.

Stoliczka studied geology and palaeontology at Prague and the University of Vienna under Professor Eduard Suess and Dr Rudolf Hoernes. He graduated with a Ph D from the University of Tübingen on 14 November 1861. His early works were studies on some freshwater mollusca from the Cretaceous rocks of the north-eastern Alps about which he wrote to the Vienna Academy in 1859. His scientific career proper started in the Austrian Geological Survey, which he joined in 1861, and his first papers there were based on work in the Alps and Hungary.

In 1862 Stoliczka joined the Geological Survey of India (GSI) under the British Government in India after being recruited by Dr Thomas Oldham (1816–1878). In Calcutta he was assigned the job of documenting the Cretaceous fossils of southern India and published them in the Palaeontologia indica, along with William Thomas Blanford. By May 1873 this work was completed with four volumes totalling nearly 1500 quarto size pages with 178 plates. Among these works was the osteological description of Oxyglossus pusillus, a fossil frog from the Deccan Traps of Bombay.

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