Georg Gürich

Who was Georg Gürich?

Georg Julius Ernst Gürich was a German geologist, paleontologist and university teacher, who wrote on Paleozoic geological formations in Poland and ranged through Guinea, Tanzania and Southern Africa, in search of unrecorded new species.

Georg Gürich studied geology in Breslau/Wroclaw. In 1885, he first went to Africa, participating in a German scientific expedition to Nigeria and travelled in the western Sudan, and in South-West Africa, now Namibia, mostly in the western mountains from Otjitambi to Rehoboth, to do geological research on behalf of the "Southwest African Gold Syndicate", with the aim of exploring alleged deposits of gold. The gold did not materialise, but his published geographical account Deutsch-Südwestafrika. Reisebilder aus den Jahren 1888 und 1889 contains substantial additional information on the current political and social conditions in Namibia. In the following years, he travelled widely in Europe, Australia, Venezuela and Alaska and returned to Africa. In 1910 he became Director of the Geological Institute at the Hamburg Colonial Institute He followed up his paleontological research on Namibia, with another field trip in 1928, resulting in many scientific publications.