Ettingshausen, Constantin von (1826 - 1897)

Austrian botanist and palaeontologist; described many fossil plants from sediments (2-60) million years old, including several Grevilleas; author of Anadenia heterophylla (A. Cunningham ex R. Brown) Ettingshausen (= Grevillea refracta R. Brown).

One of the most interesting seientists working to solve the puzzle of the origin of speeies was Constantin von Ettingshausen. In 1888, after examining a sedimentary layer encountered by tin miners, he published a description of the fossil flora at Vegetable Creek, northem New South Wales. He believed that all the world's flora was related and that the Australian element had relatives in Europe and North America. While this was later shown to be incorrect, Ettingshausen nonetheless described, among hundreds of species, two fossil grevilleas, G. proxima and G. wentworthii, from the sedimentary layer between two and 60 million years old. While these two are unlikely in fact to be grevilleas, he and, to some extent Mueller, were the first to try to identify the Australian fossil flora.

Source: Olde, P. and Marriott, N. (1994) The Grevillea Book. Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst.