Otto Schindewolf

Otto Schindewolf

Otto Heinrich Schindewolf (7 June 1896, Hanover, Germany - 10 June 1971, Tübingen, West Germany) was a German paleontologist who studied the evolution of corals and cephalopods.

Schindewolf was on the faculty at the University of Marburg from 1919 until 1927. He then he became director of the Geological Survey of Berlin. In 1948 he became a professor at the University of Tübingen, where he retired as professor emeritus in 1964.

He was a saltationist who opposed the theory of gradual evolution, and in the 1930s suggested that major evolutionary transformations must have occurred in large leaps between species. This idea became known as the Hopeful Monster theory and was further taken and developed up by the geneticist Richard Goldschmidt in the 1940s. Schindewolf was also the first to suggest, in 1950, that mass extinctions might have been caused by extraterrestrial impacts or nearby supernova. From 1948 until his retirement in 1964, Schindewolf was professor of Geology and Paleontology at the University of Tübingen.