For the 19th century chemist by the same name, see Johannes Thiele (chemist)

Johannes Thiele (chemist)

Friedrich Karl Johannes Thiele was a German chemist and a prominent professor at several universities, including those in Munich and Strasbourg. He developed many laboratory techniques related to isolation of organic compounds...

.

Johannes Thiele, full name Karl Hermann Johannes Thiele (1860–1935) was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 zoologist specialized in malacology

Malacology

Malacology is the branch of invertebrate zoology which deals with the study of the Mollusca , the second-largest phylum of animals in terms of described species after the arthropods. Mollusks include snails and slugs, clams, octopus and squid, and numerous other kinds, many of which have shells...

. His Handbuch der systematischen Weichtierkunde (English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

 edition published by the Smithsonian under the title Handbook of Systematic Malacology) is a standard work. From 1904 until his retirement in 1925 he was the curator of the malacological collection at the Museum für Naturkunde (Museum of Natural History) in Berlin.
Thiele described more than 1.500 new species of molluscs; until today their types are deposited with the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. Especially important are his works on the Mollusca of the First German Antarctica Expedition

First German Antarctica Expedition

The Gauss Expedition , was the first German expedition to Antarctica, led by Arctic veteran and geology professor Erich von Drygalski in the ship Gauss, which was named after the mathematician and physicist Carl Friedrich Gauss.-Voyage:...

 and of the German Deep Sea Expedition aboard the vessel Valdivia.

Thiele's classification of Gastropoda

Gastropoda

The Gastropoda or gastropods, more commonly known as snails and slugs, are a large taxonomic class within the phylum Mollusca. The class Gastropoda includes snails and slugs of all kinds and all sizes from microscopic to quite large...

 has been in use up to the past decade. It modified an earlier concept of Henri Milne-Edwards

Henri Milne-Edwards

Henri Milne-Edwards was an eminent French zoologist.Henri Milne-Edwards was the 27th child of William Edwards, an English planter and militia colonel in Jamaica and Elisabeth Vaux, a French. He was born in Bruges, Belgium, where his parents had retired. At that time, Bruges was a part of the...

 (1848) with three subclasses: Prosobranchia

Prosobranchia

Not to be confused with the bivalve order Protobranchia.Prosobranchia was a large taxonomic subclass of sea snails, land snails and freshwater snails. This taxon of gastropods dates back to the 1920s...

, Opisthobranchia

Opisthobranchia

Opisthobranchs are a large and diverse group of specialized complex marine gastropods previously united under Opisthobranchia within the Heterobranchia, but no longer considered to represent a monophyletic grouping...

 and Pulmonata

Pulmonata

The Pulmonata, or "pulmonates", are an informal group of snails and slugs characterized by the ability to breathe air, by virtue of having a pallial lung instead of a gill, or gills...

. Thiele's classification was based on overall similarity between the species. This classification has been modified over the years, one recent example being the classification of Ponder & Lindberg, 1997

Taxonomy of the Gastropoda (Ponder & Lindberg, 1997)

The taxonomy of the Gastropoda, as revised by Winston Ponder and David R. Lindberg in 1997, is an older taxonomy of the class Gastropoda, the class of molluscs consisting of all snails and slugs...

, based on phylogenetic arguments

Cladistics

Cladistics is a method of classifying species of organisms into groups called clades, which consist of an ancestor organism and all its descendants . For example, birds, dinosaurs, crocodiles, and all descendants of their most recent common ancestor form a clade...

.

External links

• works by Johannes Thiele at Internet Archive
  Internet Archive
  The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...