Trained by Eduard Suess to explore the paleontological differences between the same stratigraphic intervals in different parts of Europe, Theodor Fuchs was born Hungarian in 1842, but naturalised Austrian after a long stay in Vienna. First focusing on the Tertiary of the Vienna basin, while working at the Mineralogischen Hof-Cabinet of the Naturhistorisches Museum, Fuchs had also travelled Europe from Italy to Greece, and from France to Germany, when he introduced the Chattian stage in 1894 to denote and describe the upper Oligocene.
The modern Naturhistorisches Museum, in Wien, where Theodor Fuchs worked from 1863 to 1880.
In the necessity to reconstruct the position of marine and land masses of Europe during the ‘depths’ of geological time, the paleontological content of strata was for Eduard Suess the key to stratigraphic correlation. To resolve the phases in which the Alpine system was built, and gather data on the fossil record marking a given interval in different parts of Europe, Suess needed the help of associates and students.
The geological characteristics of our Alps, especially the paleontology, are little known to the general public. What is here called “lower Lias” is in many aspects different from that which is so called in England or in Swabia.Eduard Suess, 1854
Eduard Suess in 1869, a few years after being appointed Professor of Geology in Vienna.
It was the profound contrast between the Alpine and extra-Alpine regions in western Europe that led Suess onto the way of comparative consideration of geological conditions and inspired him for those studies that found their temporary conclusion in the “Structure of the Alps” [Die Entstehung der Alpen].Theodor Fuchs, 1909
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The Chattian was so named after Chatti, the ancient german tribe inhabiting the Waser region, not far from the North Sea. The type area described by Fuchs was the region between Kassel (the name of which also comes from Chatti), Doberg and Sternberg, in northern Germany. Another reference area was the region of Ormoy, in the Paris Basin. Since Fuchs never indicated a type section, one was designated in 1957, at Doberg, near Bünde in Westphalia. In the North Sea region, the interval consisted in glauconite-rich marls and sands, with very abundant macrofossils, gastropods, bivalves and echinoderms being the most common groups.
Theodor Fuchs (1842-1925), the naturalised Austrian geologist who fathered the Chattian
Learn more
Anderson A.J., Hinsch W., Martini E., Müller C. & Ritzkowski S. (1971). Chattian. In: Carloni, G.D. (Ed.), Stratotypes of Mediterranean Neogene Stages. Giornale di Geologia 37, 69–79.
De Man E., Van Simaeys S., Vandenberghe N., Harris W.B. & Wampler J.M. (2010). On the nature and chronostratigraphic position of the Rupelian and Chattian stratotypes in the southern North Sea basin. Episodes 33, 3-14.
Fuchs T. (1894). Tertiaerfossilien aus den kohlenführenden Miocaenablagerungen der Umgebung von Krapina und Radaboj und über die Stellung der sogenannten “Aquitanischen Stufe”. Königlich-Ungarische Geologische Anstalt, Mittheilungen und Jahrbuch 10, 163-175.
Sengör A.M.C. (2014). Eduard Suess and global tectonics: An illustrated ‘short guide’. Austrian Journal of Earth Sciences 107, 6-82.
Suess E. (1885-1909). Das Antlitz der Erde. F. Tempsky, Vienna, 3 volumes.
