At the end of December 2020, Volker Mosbrugger retired, after 15 years, from his position as Director General of the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturkunde, 2 years after he turned 65, the official age for retirement in Germany. During the last 40 years, Volker has built up an international reputation not only as a leading palaeobotanist, but also as a facilitator of science as well as a science politician. This special issue is dedicated to Volker Mosbrugger (Fig. 1) as a scientist; thus, this introductionwill focus mostly on his scientific career and achievements. There are many other aspects of Volker worthy to be honoured, but only listing his many scientific prizes and awards (which include the prestigious GottfriedWilhelm Leibniz Prize awarded by the DFG in 1999, as well as an honorary doctorate in Lyon, France, and an honorary professorship in Jilin, China), memberships in academies, leading functions in large projects and scientific commissions, as well as his numerous positions for example in academic self-government, learned societies, and at Senckenberg, would fill several pages. From 1973 to 1979, Volker, born in 1953 in the city of Konstanz at Lake Constance, studied biology and chemistry in Freiburg (Germany) and marine biology in Montpellier in France. After finishing his graduate studies in 1979, he worked in Freiburg with Dieter Vogellehner for his PhD in palaeobotany, which he received in 1983. When looking at Volker’s career from a scientific point of view, it can be subdivided in different, albeit overlapping phases in which he focussed on different topics.
He graduated from Freiburg University with a thesis on Late Carboniferous plants and continued to work on this topic, especially on pecopterids, for his PhD (e.g. Mosbrugger 1983; Mosbrugger and Vogellehner 1986). Carboniferous plants remained a focus of his early career. During this phase, he already showed a liking for numerical approaches combined with hands on research on material as well as fieldwork (Fig. 2), which led him to biomechanics, the second large focus of his research (e.g. Mosbrugger 1990; Roth-Nebelsick et al. 2001). At the same time, this work sparked his interest in evolutionary theory (e.g. Mosbrugger 1988). After finishing his PhD, Volker went to Bonn University as an assistant to the late H.-J. Schweitzer and for his habilitation (Mosbrugger 1990), at that time a pre-condition to become a professor in Germany. During this period, Volker becamemore andmore interested in research on Cenozoic environmental and climate change and was involved in the DFG funded Collaborative Research Centre “Interaction of continental material systems and their modelling” that further promoted his great interest in interdisciplinary research, processes and numeric modelling approaches (e.g. Steppuhn et al. 2006). When Volker went to Tübingen as a professor in palaeontology in 1990, this topic became even more important, and he could convince numerous of his colleagues at Eberhard Karls University “to join forces”, which led to the funding of a large collaborative research centre (Sonderforschungsbereich) “Climatically Coupled Processes in Mesozoic and Cenozoic Geo-Ecosystems” funded by the DFG, which ran from 1994 to 2001. A considerable milestone with respect to the quantitative reconstruction of palaeoclimates was the development of the Nearest Living Relative (NLR)–based Coexistence Approach (Mosbrugger and Utescher 1997; Utescher et al. 2014), an easy-to-apply, reliable and robust technique, that This is the editorial to the special issue “Palaeobotanical contributions in honour of Volker Mosbrugger”
