Werner Nachtigall

After his retirement in 2002, he became head of the BMBF-funded Competence Network Biomimetics BIOKON at the University of Saarland.

The biomechanist Steven Vogel in his book Life's devices: the physical world of animals and plants, writes, "Wherever nature has a structure, biologists have been painstakingly describing it, but most often paying little attention to mechanical functions. Nachtigall (1974) went the next step, gathering a vast collection of structural schemes for attachment, classifying them by function, and comparing each with its technological analogs. Among interlocking joints he recognizes miters, rabbets, dovetails, and mortises; under releasable attachments he describes plugs and sockets, hooks and eyes, snaps, vises, forceps, anchors, suction cups, and others. The diversity defies summarization. Even velcro has its biological analog – what Nachtigall calls 'probabilistic' attachments, coatings of burrs invented repeatedly as a dispersal device for the seeds and fruits of plants. All that these latter require is gentle contact with a sufficiently irregular surface (fur perhaps originally but cloth works at least as well) and enough burrs attach to provide a surprisingly strong connection. Velcro...represents highly successful bioemulation: its inventor Georges DeMestral, deliberately worked from the seed barbs of cocklebur and burdock."

In 1969, he was appointed professor and director of the Zoological Institute of Saarland University. In 1990, he initiated the field of study called "Technical Biology and Biomimetics" (which he supervised until his retirement in 2002) and also the "Society for Technical Biology and Bionics" (GTBB) of which he was the first chairman until 2003.

Professor Marianne Stokholm head of the Department of Architecture & Design at Aalborg university (AAU) Denmark, writes: "The German biologist Werner Nachtigall has since the 1960s been occupied with bionics. His writing on the subject is among the best."

After graduating from high school in Augsburg, he studied at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in the fields of natural sciences biology, physics, chemistry and geography with a diploma in Technical Biology and Bionics. From 1959 to 1961, he was research assistant at the Radiobiology Institute in Neuherberg, later in the Zoological Institute of the University of Munich. His research interests during this time gave rise to questions that later led to the foundation of the field of bionics in Germany. In 1967, he was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley.

Werner Nachtigall (born June 7, 1934 in Saaz, Czechoslovakia) is a German zoologist and biologist.