WHY WAS RUDOLF RICHTER’S AKTUOPALÄONTOLOGIE NOT EMBRACED BY U.S. PALEONTOLOGISTS?

Today’s actualistic paleontology, the study of modern day organisms in order to better interpret the fossil record, owes its origin to Rudolf Richter’s Aktuopaläontologie, a subdiscipline of paleontology that he proposed in 1928. Richter advocated studying “the formation of paleontological objects in the present …” His concept consisted of three parts: research on traces, “death and embedding,” and “biofacies.” Although well received in Germany, Richter’s new discipline did not find many followers in the United States. The “language barrier” is often cited as the reason for this, and anti German sentiment has been suggested. This study examines these as well as several other possible causes. As formerly suggested, problems of communication and ethnic/political differences were important but so were aspects of timing and the interplay between economics and academics.

When Richter proposed his concept in the late 1920s, paleontology in the U.S. was in a descriptive phase emphasizing systematics and stratigraphic distributions. Richter and his associates were simply ahead of their time with respect to the U.S. In the years leading up to World War II and during the war, an anti German bias may indeed have played a role, although Rudolf Richter himself was clearly not a Nazi sympathizer, and he was well respected by influential U.S. paleontologists such as R.C. Moore.

The critical period in determining the acceptance of Richter’s concept was much later, in the late 1950s to mid 1970s -- the era of Wilhelm Schäfer and Hans- Erich Reineck. During the post-war economic boom in the U.S., oil and gas exploration was accompanied by an academic interest in modern-day environments and processes. But, by the time Schäfer’s book summarizing decades of actualistic research at the North Sea (published in German in 1962) was translated into English (1972), it was too late to establish a new discipline. Although the book received wide acclaim, English-speaking paleontologists viewed the subject matter as lying within disparate subdisciplines such as ichnology and taphonomy. Aktuopaläontologie still has adherents today, especially in Europe, but it is generally thought of in terms of field-oriented studies with paleo-environmental implications, whereas actualistic paleontology is the recommended term for the broader discipline.