Alexander Ivanovich Petrunkevich

Alexander Ivanovich Petrunkevitch , Russian Александр Иванович Петрункевич , English transcription Alexander Petrunkevitch , (born December 22, 1875 in Pliski near Kiev ; † March 9, 1964 in New Haven (Connecticut) ) was a Russian-American palaeonologist and American palaeonologist .

His father Ivan Ilyich Petrunkevich was a member of the State Duma and founder of the Constitutional Democrats . Petrunkewitsch studied at Lomonossow University , but then had to leave Russia for political reasons and went to the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg with August Weismann , where he received his doctorate in zoology in 1900 (on the early development of the honey bee egg) and then taught cytology and parasitology as a private lecturer . He also looked after the university's parasite and spider collection, his first contact with arachnology. There he met his future American wife Wanda Hartshorn and went to the USA with her in 1903. From 1910 he was an instructor and from 1917 professor at Yale University . In 1944 he retired, but remained scientifically active.

Petrunkewitsch was a specialist in living and fossil arachnids, for example fossil preserved in coal formations and amber. He is the author of the 1956 volume Chelicerata in the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology . He was from 1954 a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, of which he was temporarily president. In 1959 he was the first to receive the Addison Emery Verrill Medal from the Peabody Museum of Natural History .

He published poems under the pseudonym Alexandr Jan-Ruban and translated Pushkin and the Igor song into English and Byron ( Manfred ) into Russian.

He described over 100 new species of spiders and started a large collection of spiders. He also experimented with live spiders in the laboratory.

Web links

• Biography in the Peabody Museum
• Biography at the National Academy of Sciences, pdf