Photo: Jan Bergström, outside his house in Täby, autumn 2010. Photo: Karna Lidmar-Bergström.
GFF Associate Editor, Professor emeritus in palaeozoology, Jan Bergström passed away in November 2012 at the age of 73. Swedish geology and the Swedish Geological Society have lost an eminent worker and a great friend and colleague. He was for many years one of the true cornerstones stones in the society and an important ambassador for GFF. Before Jan retired in 2005 he was Professor at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. His career started, however, in Lund where he studied geology and defended his doctoral thesis in 1973. The thesis is a masterpiece, devoted to the morphology, taxonomy and mode of life of trilobites. It quickly gave Jan an international reputation. He continued to teach geology at Lund University for several years before he accepted a position as State Geologist at the Geological Survey of Sweden in Lund. His survey time was dedicated mainly to projects on Scanian geology and research on fossil arthropods. In 1989 he became Professor and Head of the Palaeozoology Department at the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm. Although Jan's research was broad and included studies of various Palaeozoic marine groups, trace fossils and stratigraphy, it was arthropods and especially trilobites that became a life-long interest. His detailed studies on exceptional preservation of early faunas received wide international interest. In more recent years, he particularly devoted much time to the Cambrian Chengjiang fauna from the Yunnan province in China. Among his many important contributions in this field are the ‘Arthropods of the Lower Cambrian Chengjiang fauna’ from 1997, and the book ‘The Cambrian Fossils of Chengjiang, China – The Flowering of Early Animal Life’, published by Wiley-Blackwell in the year 2003. Over his career, Jan published nearly 170 scientific papers and monographs, and a larger number of notes, popular scientific papers and reports. He contributed with more than one hundred articles in the Swedish National Encyclopedia, and also published papers in archaeology and mythology. Jan was productive even in the last weeks of his life and actually is the co-author for one of the papers of this issue.
We have had the great privilege to share Jan's humor, wise thinking and sharp intellect at numerous of the Geological Society board meetings. He was one of the true giants in Swedish geology and his legacy will be long remembered.
Lund, in December 2012
Mikael Calner, editor-in-chief
Mark Johnson, associate editor
Magnus Ripa, associate editor