Hans Peter (Hamper) Luterbacher passed away (1938-2021)

As of November 17th 2021, Hans Peter (Hamper) Luterbacher passed away. He was born in 1938 in Basel, Switzerland, and had graduated in 1960 at the Geological-Paleontological Institute of the Basel University, under the tutoring of Prof. Manfred Reichel. In the early sixties, at Bottaccione (Gubbio), he established with Isabella Premoli Silva the first biostratigraphic scheme of the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary, based on the study of planktonic foraminifera. In this field he soon emerged among the leading scientists, following the tradition of Basel micropalentologists Hans Schaub, Lukas Hottinger and Roger Lehmann.

He studied samples from the Carribean Sea and defended his doctoral thesis at the Institute of Geology of the Moscow Academy in Russia, receiving his PhD in 1964. He worked for the Museum of Natural History of Basel and was hired in 1965 at the Exxon Research European at Bordaeux, in France.

For Exxon, in collaboration with Emiliano Mutti, Joan Rosell and Jordi Ferrer, he studied the stratigraphy of the Spanish Paleogene in the Tremp Basin, southcentral Pyrenees. For the same company he participated in 1970 and in 1973 to the Deep Sea Drilling Project (DSDP), improving knowledge and methods in deep-sea drilling.

From 1977 he was Professor of Micropaleontology at the University of Tübingen, Germany, until his retirement in 2003. He was coeditor of the Neues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie. In 1988 he was elected Secretary, then President (1995-2004) of the International Subcommission on Paleogene Stratigraphy.

After retiring, he established his home in Menorca, Baleares, where he lived with his family and where he founded the Institut Menorquí d’Estudis (IME), continuing to study fossils in collaboration with the Museo geológico del Seminario de Barcelona.

Hamper Luterbacher was estemeed by everybody an amable, peaceful and reflexive person. His colleagues remember him as one of the founders of modern Paleogene stratigraphy.

A touching memorial by Antoni Obrador, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, former student and friend, served as the basis for this note.

Selected references

Luterbacher, H., Premoli-Silva, I. 1964. Biostratigrafia del limite Cretaceo-Terziario nell’Appennino Centrale. Rivista Italiana di Paleontologia, 70: 67-128

Luterbacher, H.P. 1970. Environmental distribution of Early Tertiary microfossils, Tremp Basin, Northeastern Spain. ESSO Production Research European Laboratories. EPRE Internal report No. EPR-E-1ER-70, 48 pages, 18 plates.

Luterbacher, H.P., Eichenseer, H., Betzler, C. & A.M. Van den Hurk (1991). Carbonate – siliclastic depositional systems in the Paleogene of the South Pyrenean foreland basin: a sequence-stratigraphic approach. Special Publications of the International Association of Sedimentologists, 12: 391-407.

Luterbacher, H.P. et al. 2004. The Paleogene Period. In: Gradstein, F.M., Ogg, J.G., Smith, A. (Eds.), A Geologic Time Scale 2004. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK: 384–408.