Teichert, Curt   (1905 - 1996)

Born on 8 May 1905 in Konigsberg, East Prussia (Germany); died on 10 May 1996 in Arlington, Virginia, USA.

He studied geology at universities in Munich, Freiburg and Königsberg, receiving his Ph.D. degree from Albertus University in Königsberg in 1928.

In 1928 he married Gertrud Kaufmann, daughter of Walter Kaufmann, a physics professor in Konigsberg.

He was appointed as assistant at Freiburg from where he went to Washington to study cephalopods on a one-year Rockefeller Foundation award in 1930. In 1931-32 he took part as geologist in a Danish expedition to Greenland.

With the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany in the 1930s, he was advised by the University to divorce his wife as she had a Jewish ancestry. The couple hastily left for Copenhagen in 1933, and eked out a living there for the next four years.

A Carnegie Foundation grant in 1937 enabled the Teicherts to settle in Australia where Curt had been offered a position at the University of Western Australia in Perth.

With the outbreak of World War II the Teicherts were interned by the authorities, and were later offered a trip back to Germany in exchange for Australian prisoners of war, an offer which was politely declined.

The position as research lecturer at Perth lasted from 1937 to 1945.

During the war years he investigated reefs from a naval shipping point of view, and was a consultant to Caltex in their search for oil in Western Australia.

After the War he became assistant chief geologist in the Mines Department of Victoria until 1947, and lastly senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne until 1952.

A Fulbright Fellowship allowed Teichert to go on a fifty-university tour in 1951-52.

In 1952 Teichert started work at the New Mexico School of Mines in Socorro where he studied the local Devonian age rocks, his paper being published by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). In 1954 he joined the USGS, setting up a laboratory and the necessary infrastructure at the Denver Federal Center.

He transferred to Quetta in Pakistan in 1961, where an International Development-USGS project was improving the minerals and exploration mapping.

When the Pakistan project was wrapped up in 1964, Teichert became Regents' Professor at the University of Kansas.

He left the University of Kansas in 1977 for the University of Rochester in New York where he stayed until 1993.

He left Rochester in 1995, two years after his wife's death, and moved to Arlington in Virginia to close out his final years.

Source: Extracted from:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curt_Teichert
Portrait Photo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curt_Teichert.

Collecting localities for 'Teichert, C.' from AVH (2026)

Data from 77 specimens