Theodor Wolf

Franz Theodor Wolf (February 13, 1841 – June 22, 1924) was a German naturalist who studied the Galápagos Islands during the late nineteenth century.

He published his Ein Besuch der Galápagos-Inseln, Sammlung von Vortraegen fuer das deutsche Volk (“A Visit to the Galápagos Islands: A Collection of Presentations for the German People”) in 1892.

That consisted of Theodor Wolf, astronomer Juan Bautista Menten, José Kolberg, José Epping, Luis Dressel and botanist Luis Sodiro.

[1] He had performed a geologic survey of mainland Ecuador, but unfortunately his collections were lost in storage.

[2] Wolf’s observations, which became the standard interpretation of island geology, depicted the islands as exposed tops of oceanic volcanoes with a distinctly different composition from the volcanic mountains of South America.

Memorial plaque on his home in Dresden
School of scalloped hammerheads, Wolf Island , named after "Theodor Wolf" in the Galapagos Islands