German palaeontologist who spent the latter part of his life studying the natural history of the Galapagos Islands. Georg Baur (later anglicised to George) was born into a family of scholars in Weisswasser, Bohemia, and spent most of his youth in Hohenheim near Stuttgart where his father was a professor of forestry. As a young man Baur had decided to follow in his father's footsteps, but turned to the subjects geology and palaeontology while at university in Munich and Leipzig, where he also studied botany under K.W. Nägeli.
He went on to follow a university career in osteology and palaeontology in the United States, first at Yale (1884-1890) then at Clark University, Massachusetts. He worked on a monograph of North American tortoises and began to investigate the flora and fauna of oceanic islands during this time. In pursuit of this, he embarked on an expedition to Galapagos in 1891, where he discovered many new species and gathered evidence for his controversial rejection of the theory that the islands had their origin in volcanic upheaval. At variance with Darwin and Alexander Agassiz, Baur asserted that the Galapagos were formed like the Antilles, that is, by subsidence, and that they were at one time connected with Central America through Cocos Island.
Walter Rothschild later purchased Baur's zoological collections from the trip for his museum at Tring (now an outpost of the British Natural History Museum).
In 1892 Baur was called to the University of Chicago, where he taught specialised classes on vertebrate osteology and phylogenetics and continued to focus his research on reptiles. He was promoted to associate professor of comparative osteology and palaeontology in 1895, but began suffering from ever worsening mental health problems and was sent to recuperate in Germany in 1897. Diagnosed with general paresis, he was transferred to an asylum where he died in 1898. In his short life he had published 140 scientific papers and won over a handful of supporters for his theory about the origin of the Galapagos Islands.
Sources:
W.B. Hemsley, 1898, Gardeners' Chronicle, 24: 32
W.M. Wheeler, 1899, "Obituary: George Baur's Life and Writings", The American Naturalist, 33(385): 15-30.
