Biography :

Something about me: my name is Christian Neumann. I was born the 14th of April 1965 in Berlin, but I grew up in a small country town north of Hamburg, Germany. Already as child I was interested in nature and I am glad that my Daddy supported my interests. I spent the hours after school and the weekends exploring the woods and fields around my home town, watching birds, collecting feathers, owl pellets and other things which caught my interest. At the age of 11, I collected my first fossil sea urchin on a gravel road close to my parents house (it was a glacial erratic Galerites vulgaris from the Late Cretaceous). This was the starting point of my palaeontological career. From this time onwards, I spent more and more time collecting fossils in the gravel pits and chalk quarries in the vicinity of my home. As my collection grew, I felt that I should specialize. I always found sea urchins (and other echinoderms) are the most beautiful and fascinating of all fossils - now I understand that my very first finding was a pointer of destiny. Meanwhile, I am curator of fossil echinoderms at the Berlin Museum of Natural History!

Although I got specialized on palaeontology rather early in my life, I am still interested in other areas of natural history, especially bird-watching. I moved to (West) Berlin for studying geology in 1987 and when the wall came tumbling down in 1989, fantastic new opportunities were offered in the now accessible untouched and unpopulated areas (at least that's how they appeared to me) of Eastern Germany and Poland. Meanwhile, "birding" alone is not satisfying to me and I get more and more interested in bird- (and other wildlife) photography.

But how did I get interested in photographing storms and severe weather? Well, this is because of one experience not so long ago: In May, 2007 I joined a palaeontological conference at the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays/Kansas. It was on the early evening of May 4 that I witnessed one of the most severe Tornado Outbreaks of the last decades on the central plains.