Franz Werner - The Killifish Collections Project

EXPEDITIONS
	Balkans and the Mediterranean
1895-1896	Egypt and Sudan
1898	Asia Minor and Syria
1900	Peloponnese
1904	Algeria and Tunisia
1905–1906	Egypt and Sudan
1913–1914	Cameroon, Gabon, and Congo

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Franz Werner authored more than 300 scientific works, ranging from short descriptions of new species to extensive monographs. His contributions covered a wide spectrum of zoology, though reptiles and amphibians remained at the center of his interest. His “Synopsis der Reptilien und Amphibien Europas” (1897) was for many years a standard reference work.

LECTURES

BIOGRAPHY
Franz Werner was an Austrian zoologist primarily devoted to herpetology, but he also worked extensively in other areas, including ichthyology. He received his doctorate in 1890 and joined the Zoological Institute at the University of Vienna. Werner is associated with great expeditions that took place in the last decades of the 19th century and the early 20th century. Those expeditions supplied european museums – particularly the Natural History Museum of Vienna and Berlin Museum – with large amounts of zoological material. Werner’s most significant contribution to the knowledge of killifishes comes from the material collected during his 1913-1914 expedition to Cameroon, Gabon and the Congo. This expedition, which lasted almost a full year, yielded enormous collections, including a large number of new species of Aphyosemion and Fundulopanchax, later described by other scientists. Despite the similarity in name, Aphyosemion franzwerneri Scheel, 1971 was not described in honnor of Franz Werner 1867-1939 but rather in honnor of an american aquarist from Detroit with the same name. Franz Werner was definitely a great explorer and one of the pioneers of killifish exploration.