Yehudah L. Werner

Yehudah L. Werner was born in 1931 in Munich

Werner was born in Munich in 1931. His father was a community leader there. The family fled Nazi Germany in 1933 to France and England, and immigrated to the Land of Israel in 1935.

He attended the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa and took up herpetology in his teens. In 1948 he was drafted into the IDF during the War of Independence. He studied zoology at the Hebrew University from 1950 to 1956 and completed a PhD summa cum laude in 1961 under Georg Haas, on the gecko spine and tail.

He worked at the Hebrew University from 1953 and became a full professor in 1978. His research covered geckos, the link between body form and function in reptiles, and the fauna of the Middle East and its conservation. He described a number of reptile species and subspecies and curated the national amphibian and reptile collection until he retired in 2000.

He took part in founding the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel in 1953 and helped persuade the government to set up the Nature Reserves Authority. He edited the Israel Journal of Zoology for 17 years and served on the Academy of the Hebrew Language zoology terms committee for 36 years. He died on 5 June 2026.