Petr Shmidt

Born Dec. 23,1872, in St. Petersburg; died Nov. 25,1949, in Leningrad. Soviet zoologist.

Shmidt graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 1895. Between 1906 and 1930 he was a professor at the Agricultural Institute in St. Petersburg (Leningrad). At the same time, he lectured on ichthyology at the university and worked in the Zoological Museum of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1914–31). Between 1930 and 1949 he was scientific secretary of the Pacific Ocean Committee of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.

Shmidt began his ichthyological work, specifically the study of the ichthyofauna of the Pacific Ocean, in 1900. He participated in a number of major expeditions, during which he gathered a rich collection of fish. He was the first to outline the ichthyofauna of Russian territorial waters in the Far East and to propose a number of theories concerning its distribution and origin. He wrote the first major work on the marine mammals of southern Sakhalin and a number of surveys of many groups of fish found in the Pacific Ocean. He also published works on general biology, including Anabiosis (1948) and Fish Migration (1936). The Small Biological Encyclopedia (1924) was published under his guidance.