The famous botanist, paleontologist and plant physiologist Franz Unger died on 13 February 1870.
Unger studied medicine at the University of Vienna from 1820. From 1836 he taught botany and zoology in Graz, in 1850 he became professor of botany in Vienna. Unger made significant contributions to plant paleontology, but later turned to plant physiology and cell biology. Even before Charles Darwin, in 1852, Unger expressed the assumption that one plant species could only develop from another. Because of this central finding of evolutionary research, Unger is considered the “Austrian Darwin”.
