Dead Animals, Past and Present: Photography and Fossil Knowledges in Johannes Weigelt’s Recent Vertebrate Carcasses and Their Paleobiological Implications

Johannes Weigelt (1890-1948), a German paleontologist and geologist, was the first proponent of taphonomy—the study of the decay, burial, and fossilization of biological organisms. In the mid-1920s, while performing fieldwork in the U.S. Gulf Coast, he came across scores of dead cows, birds, fish, alligators, and amphibians. Many of these creatures died as a result of extreme weather storms, their remains marooned and weathering in coastal beaches, river banks, and mudflats. Weigelt considered that the physical processes affecting these animals were analogous to those that preserved Miocene fossil specimens housed at the Martin-Luther-Universität in Halle-Wittenberg, where he was a geology professor. He photographed dozens of these decomposing animals during his travels throughout Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana, setting these images alongside sketches of fossils recovered from central Germany in his 1927 book Recent Vertebrate Carcasses and their Paleobiological Implications. This ground-breaking monograph and its visual juxtaposition of post-mortem processes in contemporary and long extinct animals became a key reference for paleontology, as well as for archaeology, forensic science, and physical anthropology. This paper will present Weigelt’s photographic and field-based research in taphonomy on both sides of the Atlantic, focusing on how animal remains from the present and distant past served as concomitant sites for scientific and image-based knowledge production alike.