Oscar Werner Tiegs 1897–1956
Professor Oscar Tiegs FAA FRS was a zoologist who traced the ancestry of insects to myriapod origins and uncovered a novel muscle type powering the extraordinary speed of Dipteran wings.
Oscar Werner Tiegs (1897–1956) was a Queensland-born zoologist whose research centred on neuro-muscular histology, arthropod embryology, and the flight muscles of insects.
Through an extensive series of studies on myriapod and insect development, he built the case for the myriapod-Campodea theory of insect ancestry, tracing insects' origins back through myriapods to a Peripatus-like precursor.
His work on wing musculature identified a previously unrecognised type of muscle in Diptera, in which rapid unfused contractions – rather than conventional tetanic shortening – drive their wings' unusual speed, and he further showed that the striations in this muscle run in a spiral, or helicoid, pattern.
He held the chair of Zoology at the University of Melbourne, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1944, and was a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.
