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Martin Fritz Glaessner AM (25 December 1906 – 23 November 1989) was a geologist and paleontology. Born and educated in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he spent the majority of his life in working for geoscientific institutes in Austria, Russia, Australia, and studying the geology of the South Pacific in Papua New Guinea and Australia. Glaessner also did early work on the classification of the pre-Cambrian lifeforms now known as the Ediacaran biota, which he proposed were the stem group of modern lifeforms.
In 1932, he moved to Moscow and began working in petrogeology at the State Petroleum Research Institute until 1934. From 1934 to 1937, he worked as a Senior Research Officer at the Institute of Mineral Fuels of the Russian Academy of Sciences and was also a part-time lecturer at the University of Moscow's Moscow Petroleum Institute and Palaeontological Institute in 1936. Glaessner married Tina Tupikina in 1936, and moved back to Vienna in December late 1937. Of Jewish descent on his father's side, he was arrested on 19 March 1938 but released to work at the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (now British Petroleum) in London.
Later in 1938, he moved to Port Moresby, Territory of New Guinea (then under Australian control), where he worked for joint oil exploration companies until 1950. He held various positions at the University of Adelaide from 1950 to 1989, including chair of Geology and Palaeontology in 1964. He was an associate at the South Australian Museum from 1953 to 1989.
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