Marie Dacke

it became a flagship group for all of Europe. The Crafoord Prize was the icing on the cake. He spent all of the money associated with the latter on encouraging his favourite science. Twenty years ago, I went on a joint field trip with Dolf Seilacher to the remote Oman desert. The idea was to investigate Cambrian trace fossils and link them — for once — to a real ‘culprit’, the trilobite species that made them. Seilacher was an experienced desert hand, as driving through dune country soon proved. His redoubtable and indispensable wife Edith was an even more exciting driver. Once on the rock outcrop, Dolf paced up and down like a terrier in search of a rat. When something attracted him he would study it intently uttering “hah huh!” or something similar, followed shortly by a confident and utterly convincing forensic explanation of the trace fossil in question, in English and German. As night fell, while smoking his trademark Groucho Marx cigar, he astonished by a comprehensive knowledge of the stars in the flawless heavens. In the morning I remarked him conversing with a local in fluent Arabic. The word ‘omniscient’ came to mind. Justice could not be done to Seilacher without referring to one of his more extraordinary talents. He was a superb draughtsman. I believe he used drawing as a way of thinking through morphological or behavioural problems. The diagrams of organisms under construction or at work he created for his papers and his text-book have a uniquely convincing solidity, and a peculiar knack for making an apparently obscure point transparent. For this reason they were widely adopted in teaching throughout the paleontological world, and contributed in no small way to his reputation. Seilacher was convinced of the beauty of fossils as ‘art objects’ and sought to communicate that belief through a travelling exhibition, ‘Fossil Art’, which he curated in his later years, featuring a range of superb examples, including Ediacaran age fossils from Namibia. He would probably not have made the same artistic claims for his own work. But in the quality of his illustrations he was following a German tradition set by Ernst Haeckel, zoologist, polymath, artist and philosopher. It does not get better than that.