Johann Leonard Hoffmann
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Johann Leonard Hoffmann (1710–1782) was a
Maastricht Maastricht ( , , ; ; ; ) is a city and a Municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in the southeastern Netherlands. It is the capital city, capital and largest city of the province of Limburg (Netherlands), Limburg. Maastricht is loca ...
army surgeon and amateur geologist who collected fossils from the local
Mount Saint Peter Mount Saint Peter ( French: ''Montagne Saint-Pierre''; Dutch: ''Sint-Pietersberg''), also referred to as Caestert Plateau, is the northern part of a plateau running north to south between the valleys of the river Geer to the west, and the Meus ...
. He is known for fossils named after him, and was one of the three people contacted on the discovery of the
Mosasaurus ''Mosasaurus'' (; "lizard of the Meuse (river), Meuse River") is the type genus (defining example) of the mosasaurs, an extinct group of aquatic Squamata, squamate reptiles. It lived from about 82 to 66 million years ago during the Campanian an ...
in 1766, and especially the second one in the 1770s known as "le grand animal", that was later taken to Paris by the
French Revolutionary Army The French Revolutionary Army () was the French land force that fought the French Revolutionary Wars from 1792 to 1802. In the beginning, the French armies were characterised by their revolutionary fervour, their poor equipment and their great nu ...
in 1794.


History

In 1798
Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond (17 May 174118 July 1819) was a French geologist, volcanologist and traveller. Life He was born at Montélimar. He was educated at the Jesuit's College at Lyon and afterwards at Grenoble where he studied law and ...
published his first volume of a monumental natural history series, called ''Histoire naturelle de la montagne de Saint-Pierre de Maestricht'', which also contained an account of the circumstances of the find. According to him Dr Hoffmann paid the quarrymen when they informed him of fossil finds. When the second skull was found in 1770, Hoffmann supposedly lead the excavation. Afterwards another local amateur geologist, the local canon priest Theodorus Joannes Godding (1722–1797), claimed his rights as landowner and forced Hoffmann to relinquish his ownership through a lawsuit, won by influencing the court. Whether or not this story was based on fact, De Saint-Fond saved the specimen for science, promising a considerable reward to Godding to compensate for his loss. However, of this famous story very little can be substantiated by archival evidence. Godding was the original owner, Hoffmann never possessed the fossil, and there was no lawsuit. Faujas de Saint-Fond probably never paid anything and the entire account seems to have been fabricated by him to liven up his book. The local army luitenant Jean Baptiste Drouin was also an avid collector of fossil specimens, and both Drouin and Hoffmann were in correspondence with the famous amateur geologist
Petrus Camper Petrus Camper FRS (11 May 1722 – 7 April 1789), was a Dutch physician, anatomist, physiologist, midwife, zoologist, anthropologist, palaeontologist and a naturalist in the Age of Enlightenment. He was one of the first to take an interest in ...
about the finds. Camper postulated that the animal was a whale, or in any case a sea creature, rather than a land creature. Faujas de Saint-Fond insisted it was a crocodile, while Camper's son Adriaan claimed it was a monitor lizard and
Georges Cuvier Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, baron Cuvier (23 August 1769 – 13 May 1832), known as Georges Cuvier (; ), was a French natural history, naturalist and zoology, zoologist, sometimes referred to as the "founding father of paleontology". Cuv ...
felt that it may be something as yet unknown, (the concept of
extinct Extinction is the termination of an organism by the death of its Endling, last member. A taxon may become Functional extinction, functionally extinct before the death of its last member if it loses the capacity to Reproduction, reproduce and ...
ion was new). Much later,
Hermann Schlegel Hermann Schlegel (10 June 1804 – 17 January 1884) was a German ornithologist, herpetologist and ichthyologist. Early life and education Schlegel was born at Altenburg, the son of a brassfounder. His father collected butterflies, which stimulated ...
accused Hoffmann of falsifying his observations of the fossil. Schlegel was the first to discover that the limbs were actually flippers. Other fossils that are named after Hoffmann are the giant turtle
Allopleuron ''Allopleuron'' (meaning "other side") is a genus of extinct sea turtle, which measured long in life. The type species is ''Allopleuron hofmanni''. It is a basal member of the clade Pancheloniidae, closely related to '' Protosphargis''. Similar ...
and another monitor lizard Varanus. File:Allopleuron hoffmani.JPG, Extinct sea turtle Allopleuron hoffmaniGeologie van Nederland
/ref> File:Varanus hoffmani, Prebreza.jpg, Miocene monitor lizard, Varanus hoffmani, from Serbia


References

*
Dinosaurs and Other Extinct Saurians: A Historical Perspective
', edited by Richard Moody, E. Buffetaut, D. Naish, D. M. Martill on
Google books Google Books (previously known as Google Book Search, Google Print, and by its code-name Project Ocean) is a service from Google that searches the full text of books and magazines that Google has scanned, converted to text using optical charac ...
*
Histoire naturelle de la montagne de Saint-Pierre de Maestricht
', by Barthélemy Faujas de Saint-Fond on Google books * , a 5th generation descendant of Johann Leonard Hoffmann about his forebear's experience with the Mosasaurus on
YouTube YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim who were three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in ...
from 100th anniversary Natuurhistorisch Museum Maastricht and 350th anniversary Stadsbibliotheek Maastricht {{DEFAULTSORT:Hoffmann, Johann Leonard 1710 births 1782 deaths Amateur geologists People from Maastricht Dutch paleontologists Dutch surgeons