Hottinger, Lukas Conrad

Lukas Hottinger (Düsseldorf, Febr. 25, 1933), Dr. phil. II, Dr. h.c., Professor (retired) for Geology and Paleontology at the University of Basel, Switzerland.
Born into a family of Medical Doctors, he absolved during 12 years the primary and secondary schools on the Cathedral Hill of Basel overlooking the river Rhine. The classic high school teaching Latin and Greek prepared him to his later professional productivity.
At Basel University he started his studies in the Faculty of Medicine but soon changed to Earth Sciences and in particular to Micropaleontology. Under the direction of Prof. Manfred Reichel, who in 1937 had introduced comparative anatomy in micropaleontology, he graduated in 1959 with a PhD thesis on the biostratigraphy and classification of Eocene Alveolinids, mainly from the Pyrenees. In the same year he married Monique Riggenbach who gave him three sons.
In 1959 he got a first professional position at the Geological Survey of Morocco in Rabat in order to mount the first micropaleontological laboratory in this country. Together with prof. Anne Faure-Muret he also started to teach at the University of Rabat. The Moroccan period ended with the publication of a monograph on larger Jurassic foraminifera and their structures that was in 1965 accepted as "Habilitationsschrift".
Called back to Basel in 1964, he accepted a position of assistent curator at the Museum of Natural History, where he produced a new permanent exposition of the geology of the Basel region. In 1966 he succeeded Manfred Reichel as professor at the University of Basel, where he taught all aspects of Paleontology from unicellular to vertebrate organisms until 1998.
In 1969 Prof. Ivan Rakovec, then head of the Paleontological Laboratory of SAZU in Ljubljana, asked for support for Katica Drobne from the same institution in her work on the Alveolinids of her country. Later, a quasi permanent collaboration developed because the Alveolinids of Slovenia complement the faunas of the same age in the Pyrenees and thus resolved many open questions about the alveolinacean phylogeny. The collaboration was extended to several other groups of larger foraminifera and to ecological subjects. They were treated in common publications and also in international courses on benthic foraminifera, one of them at the Marine Station in Piran. The collaboration still operates today. Its long duration permitted to closely follow the rise of modern Slovenia and to develop emotional ties with its population. Similar collaborations, originally based on reviews of PhD theses, were established with the Universities of Barcelona, Naples, Isphahan and Lahore.
As guest professor at the University of Jerusalem he started in 1971 to investigate the recent larger foraminifera in the Gulf of Aqaba, the only tropical sea to be reached by car on a regular ferry in order to transport all the material necessary for scuba diving from the Basel laboratory directly to the shore in the gulf of Elat. In the Steinitz Marine Biological Laboratory, in these years under the direction of Professor Zeev Reiss from the Hebrew University, the Swiss crew were welcome guests. The results of about a decade of research was published in 1984 as "ecological study nr. 15" by Springer (Heidelberg). SAZU enabled the printing of the corresponding taxonomic inventary in 1993. TEM tudies of the living protoplasm and the functionning of the carbonate factory in tropical shallow water complemented the field work. In the Swiss Academy of Natural Sciences L. Hottinger had several different duties during his many years of active professional life. In contrast to foreign Academies, the membership is not given as distinction or reward for outstanding scientific work but signals the willingness of the recipient to do voluntary work as in many other Swiss militia organisations. From 1988-1994 he was vicepresident of the Academy.

From 1954 to 2010 L. Hottinger produced 160 publications, of which 6 are larger monographs or books. The following list of publications selects books and articles according to their significance in Hottinger's scientific career:
Hottinger, L. (1962) Recherches sur les Alveolines du Paleocene et de 1'Eocene. Mem. Suisses de Paleontologie 57/76: 243 p.
Hottinger, L. (1967) Foraminiferes imperfores du Mesozoique Marocain. Memoires Service Geologique du Maroc (Rabat) no. 209, 129 p.
Hottinger, L. (1977) Foraminiferes operculiniformes. Memoires Museum National Histoire Naturelle Paris, t. C 40, 159 p.
Hottinger, L. and Drobne, K. (1980) Early Tertiary conical imperforate foraminifera. Razprave 22/3: 169-276.
Hottinger, L. (ed.) (1980) Rotaliid Foraminifera. Memoires Suisses de Paleontologie vol. 101: 154p.
Reiss, Z. and Hottinger, L. (1984) The Gulf of Aqaba: Ecological Micropaleontology. Ecological studies 50, Springer (Heidelberg), 354 p.
Hottinger, L. (1988) Conditions for generating Carbonate Platforms. Memorie Society Italiana vol. 40: 265-271.
Hottinger, L., Drobne, K. and Caus, E. (1989) Late Cretaceous, Larger, Complex Miliolids (Foraminifera) Endemic in the Pyrenean Faunal Province. Facies (Erlangen), vol. 21: 99-134.
Hottinger, L., Halicz, E. and Reiss, Z. (1993) Recent Foraminiferida from the Gulf of Aqaba, Red Sea. Dela SAZU (Ljubljana), vol. 33: 179 p.
Hottinger, L. (2000) Functional morphology of benthic foraminiferal shells, envelopes of cells beyond measure. micropaleontology 46, suppl. 1: 57-86.
Hottinger, L. (2001) Archaiasinids and related porcelaneous larger foraminifera from the Late Miocene of the Dominican Republic. Journal of Paleontology 75/3: 475-512. Hottinger, L. (2001) Learning from the past. In: Levi-Montalcini R. (ed.) Frontiers of Life, Vol. 4, part 2: Discovery and spoliation of the biosphere, pp. 449-477. 18 figs. 2 tab. Academic Press (London & San Diego).
Hottinger, L. (2006) The depth depending ornamentation of some lamellar-perforate foraminifera. Symbiosis (Philadelphia & Rehovot), vol. 42: 141-151.
Hottinger, L. (2006) Illustrated glossary of terms used in foraminiferal research. Notebooks on Geology (Brest), Memoir 2006/2, 126 p. 83 figs. Electronic publication: http://paleopolis.rediris.es/cg/uk_index.html_MO2 pdf 1-4.
Hottinger, L. (2008) The role of biogenous carbonate production in the ecology of shallow benthic communities in oligotrophic waterbodies. In F. D. Por (ed.): Aqaba¬Elat, the Improbable Gulf. Environment, Biodiversity and Preservation. Magnes Press (Jerusalem), p. 153-176.
Awards: 1971: Commemorative Medal of the Hungarian Geological Survey, Budapest. 1994: Foreign Member of the Slovenian Academy of Arts and Sciences, Ljubljana. 1995: Medal of the Geological Society of Punjab, Lahore. 1997: Honorary Doctorate from Autonomous University of Barcelona, Bellaterra. 1997: Cushman Award in Saltlake City, USA. 1999: Foreign correspondent of the German Paleontological Society.

(March 2011)