Hans Reck
| Hans Gottfried Reck | |
|---|---|
Hans Reck
|
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| Born | 24 January 1886 |
| Died | 4 August 1937 (aged 51) |
| Occupation | Paleontologist |
| Known for | 1913 discovery of Olduvai skeleton |
Hans Gottfried Reck (24 January 1886 – 4 August 1937) was a German volcanologist and paleontologist. In 1913 he was the first to discover the ancient skeleton of a human in the Olduvai Gorge, in what is now Tanzania. He collaborated with Louis Leakey in a return expedition to the site in 1931.
Reck was born into a military family in Würzburg, Bavaria on 24 January 1886. He attended the universities of Wurzburg and Berlin, where he studied natural history and became deeply interested in volcanoes.
In the summer of 1907 the geologist Walther von Knebel, a friend and fellow student of Reck's, disappeared during a field trip in Iceland. Hans Reck was charged with determining what had happened, and set out in June 1908 with two local guides and his fiance, Ina von Grumbkow. The party traveled 1,500 kilometres (930 mi) on horseback in eleven weeks. Reck and the Icelander Sigurður Sumarliðason were the first people ever to reach the summit of the Herðubreið volcano, 1,060 metres (3,480 ft) above the surrounding plain.
Reck climbed down to the edge of what would later be called Lake Knebel (now Öskjuvatn), a boiling sulphurous lake where von Knebel's death had been reported, but found no remains. However, they concluded that von Knebel had died in an accidental drowning when his boat overturned. Reck used what he learned about volcanoes on this expedition in his doctoral dissertation. He graduated from the University of Munich in November 1910 and took up a post in the Berlin Museum of Natural History.
Hans Reck studied at University College London, then became a private lecturer at the Museum of Natural History. He married Ina von Grumbkow in February 1912. She was considerably older than him, having been born in September 1872, and was a strong and capable woman. The Recks were assigned to follow up the 1911 expedition that had made a large collection of fossils at Tendaguru in German East Africa (now Tanzania). They reached Tendaguru in June 1912, rebuilt the camp and quickly settled into a routine of quarrying to collect dinosaur bones, helped by a large workforce of local people. Great quantities of rubble were excavated to uncover the bones, which lay about 4 metres (13 ft) below the surface. These included the well-preserved skeletons of two stegosaurs, an armor-plated dinosaur.
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