Björn Kröger

Björn Kröger is curator of the Paleontological Collections of the Finnish Museum of Natural History, and associated professor at Helsinki University, Finland. His first profession was “machine operator for nuclear power plants” in 1989. He studied Geology, earned his PhD in the field of paleontology in 1999 at Freie University, Berlin, and since then worked as researcher in Germany, France, Sweden, and Finland. He is an expert on the evolution of the oldest cephalopods. His paleontological research focus is on the eco-evolutionary dynamics of ecosystems at various temporal and spatial scales, from global dynamics at hundreds of millions of years toward seasonal change at local scale. Recent fieldwork brought him to Finnish Lapland, where he studies the earliest traces of animal life. He recently also was involved in a study about the historical change in the plankton composition of a north German Lake.

He has an active interdisciplinary interest in how our knowledge on ecological change is gained, narrated, and used. Art / Science collaboration and artistic research is part of his research practice. Upcoming interdisciplinary publications will be a book chapter about “The Deep Time of Death” in the “Handbook of Queer Death Studies” at Routledge, and a book (in German) about Lake Stechlin (Germany) at Matthes & Seitz publishers.

 

Image: Microbial decay at Lake Stechlin. Photo: Björn Kröger.