Othenio Abel was a battling Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n paleontologist

Paleontology

Paleontology "old, ancient", ὄν, ὀντ- "being, creature", and λόγος "speech, thought") is the study of prehistoric life. It includes the study of fossils to determine organisms' evolution and interactions with each other and their environments...

. Together with Louis Dollo

Louis Dollo

Louis Antoine Marie Joseph Dollo was a French-born Belgian palaeontologist, known for formulating Dollo's law. He graduated as an engineer at École Centrale de Lille in France. In 1878, he supervised the excavation of the famous, multiple Iguanodon find, at Bernissart, Belgium. Recently, the...

, he was the founder of paleobiology

Paleobiology

Paleobiology is a growing and comparatively new discipline which combines the methods and findings of the natural science biology with the methods and findings of the earth science paleontology...

 and studied the life and environment of fossilized organisms. From 1917-1934 he was a university professor in Vienna and later headed the Institute of Paleontology at the University of Göttingen. He also explored the Drachenhöhle

Drachenhöhle

Drachenhöhle is a cave near Mixnitz, Styria, Austria, south-east of Bruck an der Mur at an elevation of 950 m. During a shortage of fertilizers during World War I sediments were dug in the cave. While soldiers were digging, they discovered numerous bones of cave bears, first thought to be dragons,...

 cave at Mixnitz.

The dwarf elephant

Dwarf elephant

Dwarf elephants are prehistoric members of the order Proboscidea, that, through the process of allopatric speciation, evolved to a fraction of the size of their immediate ancestors...

 theory to explain the Cyclops

Cyclops

A cyclops , in Greek mythology and later Roman mythology, was a member of a primordial race of giants, each with a single eye in the middle of his forehead...

 was first thought of in 1914 by Othenio Abel. In 1920 he was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal

Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal

The Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal is awarded by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences "for meritorious work in zoology or paleontology published in a three- to five-year period." Named after Daniel Giraud Elliot, it was first awarded in 1917....

 from the National Academy of Sciences

United States National Academy of Sciences

The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...

.

Further reading

• Baumgartel, Hans. "Abel, Othenio." in Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  Dictionary of Scientific Biography
  The Dictionary of Scientific Biography is a scholarly reference work that was published from 1970 through 1980. It is supplemented by the New Dictionary of Scientific Biography and an electronic version that includes both publications....
  
  . (1970). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Vol. 1: p.17-18.