Ernst Gaupp

Ernst Gaupp was a German anatomist, born in 1865 in Beuthen in Upper Silesia, a town now called Bytom in Poland, who died in 1916. He studied natural sciences and medicine at Jena, Königsberg and Breslau, where he took his doctorate in 1889, and then worked as an anatomist at Freiburg im Breisgau, Königsberg and Breslau. He is best remembered for research on how the cranium of vertebrates develops, and is credited with laying the foundation and method for modern studies of the form and formation of skulls. With Karl Bogislaus Reichert he gave his name to the Reichert-Gaupp theory about the origin of the ossicles of the mammalian ear. His writings include work on the primordial cranium of amphibians and reptiles, a revised anatomy of the frog and a long study of the Reichert theory of the hammer, anvil and jaw.