Ludwig Glauert. From Sheffield to the Extinct and Extant Fauna of Western Australia

Ludwig Glauert
(National Library of Australia)

Ludwig Glauert was, I discovered when in The Kimberley of Western Australia, a kingpin of biological science in Western Australia in the early years of the 20th Century. For many years he was at the Western Australian Museum and for many of those years he was the only resident scientist in the state investigating the geology, particularly the palaeontology, and zoology of Western Australia. As well as his investigations of the extinct marsupial megafauna he became the expert on the reptiles of the state.

When I first saw the name Glauert I assumed he was a museum-minded German or Swiss national who had made his way to an opening in Australia. I was wrong. Glauert was born in Sheffield. Not only was he born in Sheffield he was educated at the precursors of the University of Sheffield—Firth College and the Technical School. Ludwig Glauert, fellow Sheffield graduates, was one of us.

Ludwig Glauert’s father, Johann Ernst Luis Heinrich, had been born in Germany in 1846. There he married a German-born Englishwoman, Amanda Watkinson, in 1877. They then moved to Sheffield where Ludwig was born on 5 May 1879. In the censuses Ludwig’s father is described as a hardware merchant and exporter of steel cutlery. In 1881 he was the employer of four men and three women. It would seem that Glauert senior, who was known as Louis, was known in the city before 1979 since he was admitted as a Freemason in 1872. He became a British subject in 1893.

The very short biographies of Ludwig state that he was trained as a geologist and spent four years as a demonstrator at Firth College. If I read the history correctly geology was taught as an offshoot of mining, possibly wholly by evening classes. Glauert then worked for his father (in the 1901 census he is listed as a ‘merchant’s clerk’).

Geology at the proto-university of Sheffield was driven by somebody special: Henry Clifton Sorby FRS (1826-1908). Sorby was born in Sheffield, the grandson of a Master Cutler and descendant of the first Master Cutler. He was largely self-taught and was active in research in chemistry, metallurgy and biology as well as in geology. At the age of 31 he was elected to the Royal Society. Sorby never married and lived with his widowed mother. After her death he bought a yacht to spend the summer months on the estuaries of rivers in eastern England, making observations and collecting samples.

Ludwig was not the only scientist in the family. His brother, Hermann Glauert FRS (1892-1934) was a mathematician and head of the aerodynamics department at the Royal Aircraft Establishment, Farnborough. His sister, Elsa, was a noted mathematician at Cambridge; she could sit the examinations but not, of course, being a she, receive a degree. 

Ludwig Glauert was active in the Sheffield Naturalists’ Club, serving on its Council along with academics from the university (Alfred Denny (1860-1947), for example, the first Professor of Biology), amateur naturalists and geologists. The goings-on of the Club were reported in the local press.

Ludwig married Winifred Aimee Beresford in Sheffield in 1907. He then took a job with the geological survey of the Mines Department of Western Australia as palaeontologist based at the museum in Perth. Then, in 1910, he was appointed to the staff of the museum, as the director's scientific assistant. In 1914 he was promoted to Keeper of Geology and Ethnology. 

For six years between 1909 and 1915 he worked in the field on the Pleistocene limestone of the Margaret River Caves, investigating the remains of several species of extinct marsupials and monotremes and of eastern Australian and Tasmanian mammals whose presence in Western Australia had never been suspected.

The story of the Margaret River Caves by Lindsay Hatcher includes the following description of how Glauert became involved as well as of the species and specimens found there:

Reports of the discovery of Mammoth Cave date back to as early as 1895. Mammoth Cave was located by Surveyor Mr Marmaduke Terry in September 1900, and explored by Tim Connelly and Ned Dawson, with Ned being the first to go through the cave and discover the “back door”. Tim conducted unofficial tours through the cave until 1904 when it was officially opened as a tourist cave. He also named the cave “The Dawn of Creation” perhaps due to the expanse of light reflecting off the stream in winter or maybe because of the abundance of fossils found in the cave. 

In 1904 Edgar Robinson; superintendent of the caves and cave guide Tim Connelly were constructing a walkway roughly below the largest solution pipe some 50 metres into the cave (i.e. near the top platform). One of these gentlemen unearthed some rather odd bones. In the same year Connelly notified his good friend Colonel Le Souef of the find. At the time Le Souef had considerable standing within the scientific community as he had been responsible for establishing the Perth Zoological gardens in the 1890’s.

Le Souef in turn notified Mr Bernard Woodward – Director of the W.A. Museum. At this time no one was actively working in Palaeontology and very little work was being done in Archaeology. Bernard Woodward contacted his cousin Mr H.P. Woodward who was working in the Mines Dept., with the fledgling Geological Survey of W.A. It turned out that H.P. Woodward had on staff a young graduate, just out of university and freshly arrived from England, (the Midlands he believed) by the name of Ludwig Glauert. 

Glauert was seconded from the Mines Dept. to the Museum with the brief of Palaeontological Research in the entire South-West. During the years of 1909-1915 two sites in Mammoth Cave; the “Le Souef” and the “Glauert” sites were excavated by the W.A. Museum. Many bones of extinct animals including megafauna bones were found; the fossil material was removed and is now stored in the W.A. Museum. 

Glauert first completed the “Le Souef” dig – at the base of the old solution pipe. It was from this site that a Giant Echidna (Zaglossus hacketti), a Short-faced Kangaroo (Simosthenurus occidentalis) and a Wombat (Vombatus hacketti) were found. The almost complete wombat skeleton was found in the solution pipe, suggesting it perished in the original pipe which now lies on top of the rockpile. Glauert then moved to the north wall to what is known as the “Glauert” dig.

The material in which the bones were embedded comprised two groups; the lower series consisted of reddish coarse sand containing fragments of wood and gastropod shells in addition to the bones, with occasional bands of black loamy soil of 25mm thickness. Layers of stalagmite (flowstone) often enclosed the bones, wood fragments and bearing casts of eucalyptus leaves were not uncommon. One of these layers was completely covering the sediments, thus protecting the animal remains. The upper layer was a sandy bed which was yellowish in colour; the bones it contained were much fresher in appearance compared with the lower sediments. 

Glauert believed that the bone bearing deposit was a remnant of a mass of bone breccia which at one time partly filled the large chamber. This remnant was protected by a coating of flowstone for many years until the protection was undermined by the stream flowing through the cave and much of the material with its priceless store of animal remains was washed away and lost to science. 

Excavations produced a sizeable fossil collection, some 10,000 specimens; his total excavation amounted to 30 cubic metres of soil. Unfortunately the stratigraphical relationship was poorly documented, probably due to inadequate resources and time constraints, making any assessment of relative ages of the material extremely hard. 

The assemblage contains 34 vertebrate species, most of which are small and typical of the south-west today. Several types of large extinct animals are represented i.e. Megafauna. These include the Giant Echidna (Zaglossus hacketti), Wombat (Vombatus hacketti), Wallaby (Wallabia kitcheneri), the giant extinct diprotodontid (Zygomaturus trilobus), extinct browsing kangaroos (Simosthenurus occidentalis and Simosthenurus brownei) and the Marsupial Lion (Thylacoleo carnifex). Other groups of animals represented are those which still occur in Eastern Australia or Tasmania: the Koala (Phascolarctos cinereus), Tasmanian Devil (Sarcophilus harrisii) and Tasmanian Tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus). The south-west corner seems to have changed very little even though the giant marsupial fauna has disappeared. 

Ludwig Glauert in the Western Australian Museum with remains of fossil marsupials from Mammoth Cave,
Margaret River
Photograph by EL Mitchell first published in the Western Mail 19 June 1914
National Library of Australia

News of his work at Margaret River reached Sheffield. The Sheffield Daily Telegraph of Friday 8 April 1910 reported the findings under the headline, ‘Proves Useful in Australia, which reminded readers: ‘The matter is of interest in this district, apart from its scientific value, on account of the excellent work done in connection with it by Mr. Ludwig Glauert who will be remembered as a Sheffield student and as a demonstrator in geology at the University of Sheffield’.

Glauert’s interests extended far beyond paleontology. He studied aboriginal culture, publishing newspaper articles under the pen-name, ‘Jay Penne’ and studied the extant fauna of Western Australia as well as the extinct.

In October 1917 Glauert enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force for service in the latter stages of the First World War as a field company engineer in the 51st Infantry Battalion. The reinforcements for this Western Australian battalion sailed for Europe on the troopship HMAT Aeneas.  51st Battalion was part of the counter-attack at Villers Bretonneux on 24/25 April 1918 during which action the Battalion lost 389 men in two days.

After the war ended he lectured to servicemen and studied Australian material in the Natural History Museum in London.  On his return to Perth and the museum in 1920, he became keeper of the biological collections. In 1927 he was appointed Curator and then, in 1954, Director.

In his spare time he acquired an arts degree from the University of Western Australia in 1928. He collected and he wrote extensively on the fauna. Building up the museum and its collections was impeded in the inter-war years by lack of money. For many years Glauert was the only scientist; he had one technician and a taxidermist. He used his private income to buy books for the museum.

Glauert’s enthusiasm encouraged interest in the general public and especially the young. He made the museum a meeting place for the professional and amateur societies and clubs with members interested in some or all aspects of natural history—mirroring in many cases the organisations that had existed in Sheffield at the turn of the century. His articles, books, lectures and broadcasts evoked interest which, in turn, brought in specimens, often caught and presented to its owner by that scourge of Australian wildlife, the domestic cat.

He continued to work on reptiles and scorpions after his retirement.

Ludwig Glauert died on 1 February 1963, aged 83.

The Kimberley, Australia: A Robert Mertens Day

In the early 1960s, the name Robert Mertens (1894-1975) was well-known to anybody in Britain keen on reptiles because the translation of his book, The World of Amphibians and Reptiles*, hit the bookshops and libraries in 1960. The publication of books on reptiles and amphibians was a pretty unusual event and it joined the other popular survey by Schmidt † and Inger. Living Reptiles of the World, published in 1957 but taking a very different approach.

These books though were expensive. Mertens sold for £3-3s-0d. The equivalent price today is £63 if calculated on the increase in retail prices, £136 if calculated on the increase in pay. I had Schmidt and Inger (the same price) but had to make do with Mertens renewed countless times from the local library. As a result I did not have a copy until I bought one for a few pence several years ago.

Mertens, although a museum man through and through, kept a large collection of animals at work and at home. His survey included what was known of behaviour, ecology and physiology rather than just a review of the kinds of living animals and their taxonomy.

Robert Mertens
from
Contributions to the History of Herpetology

Gradually, I found other work that Mertens had done, for example, on the European lizards and his checklist of European reptiles. I also heard of how he died (see later). However, only when I read the biography in Contributions to the History of Herpetology, did I become fully aware of his work.

In brief, Mertens was born in Russia to German parents—his father was a fur trader. Because of the social unrest that eventually exploded as the Russian Revolution he went to a German university, Leipzig to study medicine and biology. He served a short time in the German army and then joined the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt in 1919 where he stayed for the until his retirement in 1960. From 1947, he was Director of the Museum. From 1930 he was also a professor at the University of Frankfurt.

During the Second World War, he spread the collection around Germany and operated a scheme to receive specimens collected by keen soldiers by using the army’s field post system. Imagine the scene on either side of the front line in North Africa as German herpetologists studied and collected the fauna while British and Commonwealth herpetologists, like John Cloudsley-Thompson (1921-2013) of the 7th Armoured Division (Desert Rats), beavered away on the other.

On the Mitchell Plateau in the Kimberley of Western Australia, Mertens is commemorated geographically as well as zoologically. This is because he travelled, collected and explored  extensively in tropical regions including northern Australia and the Indonesian islands. In May, as we walked to Mitchell Falls we passed Little Mertens Falls, waded across the top of Big Mertens Falls and some us saw (I just got the end of the tail) Mertens’s Water Monitor (Varanus mertensi). The newly-described monitor was named in Mertens’s honour by Ludwig Glauert in 1951 (more on Glauert of the Western Australian Museum, Sheffield born and a Sheffield graduate in another post). The naming was highly appropriate—Mertens was the world expert on varanid lizards.

Arrow shows the location of Mertens Falls

Little Mertens Falls

From the cave behind Little Mertens Falls

Big Mertens Falls

Embed from Getty Images

Merten's Water Monitor above Little Mertens Falls

Beyond finding that the two sets of water falls on the Mitchell Plateau were named for him, I have been able to find nothing on when this was done nor by whom it was done. Those who walk or are flown by helicopter over his falls to the Mitchell Falls have no idea who Mertens was or of his role as one of the leading herpetologists of the 20th Century.

There is very little information on Robert Mertens in English and I do not know when he travelled in the northern part of Western Australia. From a list of some of his publications, I would assume the 1920s or 30s. What is known is his sad end. He had kept for a long time a rear-fanged vine or twig snake. When I read about this at the time it was Kirtland’s Vine Snake (Thelotornis kirtlandii) and that identification still appears in some publications including Manson's Tropical Diseases. More recently it is shown as T. capensis from further south in Africa. Whatever the species, it bit him on 5 August 1975. Mertens was 90. No antivenin had been made for this species and eighteen painful days later he died. Throughout that period he kept a diary and ended it with the famous line, ‘a singularly appropriate end for a herpetologist’.

†Karl Patterson Schmidt (1890-1957) of the Field Museum in Chicago, and with similar wide interests to Mertens, died as a result from the bite of another African rear-fanged snake, the Boomslang, Dispholidus typus, in 1957. A single fang of a small specimen caught him and after declining any treatment recorded its effects on him. He died the next day.

*The book first appeared as La Vie des Amphibiens et Reptiles in 1959 with the English, Italian and Spanish editions following. There seems to have been no publication in German. One of the reasons why it was so good is that it was translated into English by Hampton Wildman Parker (1897-1968), retired Keeper of Zoology at the Natural History Museum in London and before that, head of herpetology.

Anon. Mertens, Robert (1894-1975). 2014. In, Contributions to the History of Herpetology, Volume 1, revised and expanded. Edited by Kraig Adler, pp 98-99. (Contributions to Herpetology 30, Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles).

Glauert L 1951. A New Varanus from East Kimberley, Varanus mertensi sp.n. Western Australian Naturalist 3 (1, July 20, 1951), 14-16.

Mertens R. 1960. The World of Amphibians and Reptiles. London: Harrap.

Schmidt KP, Inger RF. 1957. Living Reptiles of the World. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Crimson Finch - a beautiful Australian bird

I couldn’t resist taking video of Crimson Finches while birdwatching along the edge of Lily Creek Lagoon in Kununnura, on the eastern edge of the Kimberley in Western Australia earlier this year.

The Crimson Finch (Neochmia phaeton) occurs in tropical Australia and a small area of New Guinea. ‘Finch’ is of course a misnomer. It, along with all Australian ‘finches’ is an estrildid, like the waxbills of Africa. Seed forms the bulk of their diet but insects, as a richer protein supply, are taken in the breeding season. All the books say they occur along water courses and those in the video were in the thick vegetation surrounding the lagoon.

The males in particular were shining in the sunlight and were living up to their specific name of ‘phaeton’ - Greek for radiant or shining. Three subspecies have been defined and the ones we saw are in the range of N. phaeton phaeton.

Here is the distribution map of the species adapted from the late Derek Goodwin’s book, Estrildid Finches of the World, published in 1982 by the British Museum (Natural History):

Pardalote. Spots before the eyes

It should have been obvious as we flicked through the book on Australian birds for the first time in 17 years. But it wasn’t. ‘It’s back to the land of the pardalote and other animals with strange names’. Even when the group saw its first pardalote at the Waterworks Reserve in Hobart, we still did not catch on. ‘Why pardalote—is it a French word for something?’ was one question.

There is one excuse why we did not twig immediately the derivation of pardalote. On previous trips to Australia in the 1990s we had previously seen only the Striated Pardalote—the same species as the pair seen in Hobart. When we later saw two other species, it should have been obvious why pardalotes are called pardalotes.

The genus Pardalotus was erected by Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot (1748-1831) and just as in Panthera pardus, the leopard, Leopardus pardalis, the ocelot, Geochelone or Stigmochelys pardalis, the leopard tortoise and Furcifer pardalis, the panther chamaeleon, it simply means ‘spotted’ in Greek and the Latin derived from Greek. So to answer the question raised above; it is sort of French.

The names of two species, both of which we saw later in Tasmania, actually refer to the spots: the Spotted Pardalote and the Forty-spotted Pardalote, providing pedants with the opportunity to point out that we then have a tautology.

Pardalotes are small, hardly-ever-still birds that feed on small invertebrates, lerp (the sugary excretion of sap-sucking psyllids) and manna.

The pair of Striated Pardalotes (Pardalotus striatus) we saw in Hobart were nesting in a hole between rocks at the side of the road, carrying food gathered from the surrounding trees. Using my extremely long focal-length lens, one of them was still just long enough to get a photograph.

Striated Pardalote. Tasmania

The next species we saw was the Forty-spotted Pardalotus quadragintus. Classified by IUCN as endangered, it is confined to southern Tasmania and there are calculated to be only 1000-1500 living individuals. Bruny Island is a stronghold of the species and we saw them in South Bruny (not included, surely erroneously, in the range in the map shown on Birdlife International) where at Inala, a special viewing platform has been constructed to view the colony there. They live in White Gum trees (Eucalyptus viminalis) exclusively. We were told they were colonial but territorial, one pair holding a feeding territory in one direction, a second pair in another direction and the third pair covering a further sector. A number of factors have been suggested as contributing to the decline, especially it would seem, clearance of White Gum. Recently, I have seen reports that the parasitic maggots of a fly are killing 75% of nestlings (a similar situation to that obtaining in the Galapagos with an introduced fly) together with the suggestion that nest infestation might be the cause of the decline from around 4000 birds in the 1980s. If that were the case then one could, of course, make the testable prediction that existing tracts of White Gum are not carrying as many Forty-spotted Pardalotes as they could.

The Forty-spotted Pardalote is the dullest looking of the four species. I had great difficulty getting a photograph and had only fleeting side-on views. They were constantly on the move, gathering food and being chased off by Honeyeaters (who defend the sources of lerp).

Forty-spotted Pardalote. South Bruny, Tasmania

Much more clearly marked and colourful is the Spotted Pardalote (Pardalotus punctatus) from Eastern and Southern Australia. We also saw that species in Tasmania, and it is then easy to see why pardalotes came by their name.