Leopold von Buch

Christian Leopold von Buch was a German geologist and paleontologist born April 26, 1774, in Stolpe an der Oder in the Margraviate of Brandenburg, Prussia, who died March 4, 1853, in Berlin, and who studied under Abraham Gottlob Werner and Alexander von Humboldt at the Freiberg mining school before becoming one of the most important contributors to geology in the first half of the nineteenth century. His research addressed volcanism, petrology, fossils, stratigraphy and mountain formation, including the scientific definition of the Jurassic system, the introduction of the term caldera into geological usage following his study of the Canary Islands, and, in 1825, among the first proposals of geographic speciation. He produced a forty-two sheet geological map of Germany in 1832 and published extensively on ammonites and other fossil groups. He was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1825, became the first foreign member of the Geological Society of London, and received the Wollaston Medal in 1842.