Richard Pokorný

Biography

After graduating from high school (Gymnázium Františka Martina Pelcla) in Rychnov nad Kněžnou he studied the Higher vocational school in Tábor and the Faculty of Environment on Jan Evangelista Purkyně University in Ústí nad Labem. Since 2004 he stay on the Faculty of Environment as the assistant, later as assistant professor, in 2015 he worked temporarily as the vice-dean for study. At university he teaches subjects related to inanimate nature, most of the time he devoted to research projects and research activities and curatorship of the geological collections. He lives in Litoměřice city, he is married and he have two sons.

Since the school years he devoted himself to the collection of minerals and fossils in his neighborhoods. He began his career in research of body-fossils and trace fossils in the eastern part of the Czech Cretaceous Basin. In his publications promotes for the region the term "podorlická křída". Since 2008, he studies the fossil assemblages in the Arctic and Subarctic region.

On Iceland, he has found and described several dozen ichnotaxa, on the Faroe Islands he identified the so far only known trace-fossils, which represents the only evidence of the presence of fossil fauna of the archipelago. An important scientific contribution is the description of two new ichnotaxa – ichnogenus Funalichnus POKORNÝ, 2008, together with the type species Funalichnus strangulatus and the ichnospecies Sedilichnus smiley POKORNÝ, 2016.

The long-term interest of Richard Pokorny is caving. He explores especially the regions in the Czech Republic, which still stood at the edge of the interests of cavers (e.g. Orlické hory, České středohoří). The greatest achievements include the discovery of the Jeskyně skřítků Cave near Děčín city, considered by speleologists as lost, or the discovery of the Pleistoce rich vertebrate bone deposits in the cave on the Radobýl hill.

The research of Richard Pokorny is closely linked to his main hobby, which is traveling. Every year, he spend several weeks in Iceland, he also done research on the Faroe islands, Argentina, Greenland, Tunisia, Sweden and Vietnam.

In 2006 he led an expedition Baobab 2006 (August 17 – September 18), dedicated to the study of animate and inanimate nature of the middle and northwest Madagascar. This expedition holds the unofficial record as the largest Czech, and (with an average of 22.6 years), the youngest team to ever visited Madagascar. The scientific samples collected during the expedition were presented at an exhibition in the National Museum in Prag