Franz Theodor Wolf (February 13, 1841 – June 22, 1924) was a German

naturalist Natural history is a domain of inquiry involving organisms, including animals, fungi, and plants, in their natural environment, leaning more towards observational than experimental methods of study. A person who studies natural history is cal ...

who studied the

Galápagos Islands The Galápagos Islands () are an archipelago of volcanic islands in the Eastern Pacific, located around the equator, west of the mainland of South America. They form the Galápagos Province of the Republic of Ecuador, with a population of sli ...

during the late nineteenth century.

Wolf Island Wolf Island () is a small island in the northern Galápagos Islands. It has an area of and a maximum altitude of above sea level. The island is remote from the main archipelago and has no permanent population. The Galápagos National Park does ...

(Wenman Island) is named after him. The peak

Volcán Wolf Wolf Volcano (), also known as Mount Whiton, is the highest peak in the Galápagos Islands. It is situated on Isabela Island and reaches . It is a shield volcano with a characteristic upturned soup bowl shape. The volcano was named after Theod ...

on Isabela Island is also named after him. He was born at

Bartholomä Bartholomä is a municipality in the German state of Baden-Württemberg, in Ostalbkreis district. Bartholomä is mainly a commuter town in the historical region of Swabia, that straddles the border between Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria B ...

(in the

Ostalbkreis The Ostalbkreis is a Districts of Germany, ''Landkreis'' (district) in the east of Baden-Württemberg, Germany, on the border to Bavaria. Neighboring districts are (from the north clockwise) Schwäbisch Hall (district), Schwäbisch Hall, Ansbach ( ...

). He published his ''Ein Besuch der Galápagos-Inseln, Sammlung von Vortraegen fuer das deutsche Volk'' (“A Visit to the Galápagos Islands: A Collection of Presentations for the German People”) in 1892. His observations also include notes on the human population on the islands. He is one of the protagonists of the ''Golden age of Ecuadorian botany'' which started in 1870 when Ecuadorian Ecuadorian President and aristocrat

Gabriel García Moreno Gabriel Gregorio Fernando José María García Moreno y Morán de Butrón (24 December 1821 – 6 August 1875), was an Ecuadorian politician and aristocrat who twice served as President of Ecuador (1861–65 and 1869–75) and was assassinated ...

brought members of a

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany, the country of the Germans and German things **Germania (Roman era) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizenship in Germany, see also Ge ...

Jesuits The Society of Jesus (; abbreviation: S.J. or SJ), also known as the Jesuit Order or the Jesuits ( ; ), is a religious order (Catholic), religious order of clerics regular of pontifical right for men in the Catholic Church headquartered in Rom ...

Order to manage the

National Polytechnic School The National Polytechnic School ( Spanish: ''Escuela Politécnica Nacional''), also known as EPN, is a public university in Quito, Ecuador. The campus, named after José Rubén Orellana, is located in the east-central part of Quito. It occupies ...

and the

Quito Astronomical Observatory The Quito Astronomical Observatory () is a research institute of EPN, the National Polytechnic School in Quito, Ecuador. Its major research fields are astronomy and atmospheric physics. The Quito Astronomical Observatory is one of the oldest ob ...

. That consisted of Theodor Wolf, astronomer Juan Bautista Menten, José Kolberg, José Epping, Luis Dressel and botanist

Luis Sodiro Luis Sodiro (1836–1909) was an Italian Jesuit priest and a field botanist from Vicenza who described a large number of species from the area around Quito, Ecuador in the early 20th century. He was perhaps the first person who collected in thi ...

. He had performed a geologic survey of mainland

Ecuador Ecuador, officially the Republic of Ecuador, is a country in northwestern South America, bordered by Colombia on the north, Peru on the east and south, and the Pacific Ocean on the west. It also includes the Galápagos Province which contain ...

, but unfortunately his collections were lost in storage. Wolf’s observations, which became the standard interpretation of island geology, depicted the islands as exposed tops of oceanic

volcanoes A volcano is commonly defined as a vent or fissure in the crust of a planetary-mass object, such as Earth, that allows hot lava, volcanic ash, and gases to escape from a magma chamber below the surface. On Earth, volcanoes are most often fo ...

with a distinctly different composition from the volcanic mountains of

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a considerably smaller portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It can also be described as the southern Subregion#Americas, subregion o ...

. As a

botanist Botany, also called plant science, is the branch of natural science and biology studying plants, especially Plant anatomy, their anatomy, Plant taxonomy, taxonomy, and Plant ecology, ecology. A botanist or plant scientist is a scientist who s ...

he described or co-described numerous species within the genus ''

Potentilla ''Potentilla'' is a genus containing over 500 species of Annual plant, annual, Biennial plant, biennial and Perennial plant, perennial herbaceous plant, herbaceous flowering plants in the rose family (biology), family, Rosaceae. Potentillas m ...

''.IPNI
List of plants described and co-described by Wolf He died in

Dresden Dresden (; ; Upper Saxon German, Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; , ) is the capital city of the States of Germany, German state of Saxony and its second most populous city after Leipzig. It is the List of cities in Germany by population, 12th most p ...

References

External links

*
Observations of Theodor Wolf
1841 births 1924 deaths People from Ostalbkreis People from the Kingdom of Württemberg Galápagos Islands 19th-century German explorers 20th-century German geologists German naturalists 19th-century German botanists 19th-century German geologists {{Germany-scientist-stub