Zawiłe ścieżki badań nad kręgowcami dewońskimi w Polsce

Abstract

Complex history of studies of Devonian vertebrates in Poland.A b s t r a c t. We all represent a great group of vertebrates, Tetrapoda. Nowadays this is diversified and large taxon which includes eg. dogs, elephants, frogs as well as snakes, sparrows and dolphins. All of them (and us) have a common ancestor which lived in area of the present-day Holy Cross Mountains over 395 myr ago, that is in the Middle Devonian times (Niedźwiedzki et al., 2010). In this paper we recall our great scientists who made first steps in this field and opened the way for the next discoveries. We also present a brief history of Polish vertebrate paleontology. Last years of XIX and the beginning of XX century gave us many classical papers written by great geologists such as Georg Gürich and Jan Czarnocki. They created a general framework for the recent knowledge about the Devonian of the Holy Cross Mountains and collected many important specimens subsequently investigated by paleontologists — Zinaida Gorizdro-Kulczycka, Julian Kulczycki, Michał Ginter and authors of this paper. One of those paleontologists — Julian Kulczycki — created a scientific basis for Polish centre of studies on Paleozoic vertebrates. Because of reasons independent of him, Kulczycki could not achieve this goal. Inspired by Kulczycki’s work as well as our discovery of footprints of first tetrapods and other new finds we decided to form a working group of young scientists to carry out further investigations. The studies are to be conducted in the Holy Cross Mountains Paleontological Laboratory which is being organized in the Kielce branch of the Polish Geological Institute — National Research Institute and in close cooperation with several national and foreign research centers.