Pavlova, Mariia Vasilevna

Pavlova, Mariia Vasil’evna 

Born June 15 (27), 1854, in Kozel’sk, in present-day Kaluga Oblast; died Dec. 23, 1938, in Moscow. Soviet paleontologist. Honorary member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1930; corresponding member 1925); academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (1921).

Pavlova, who studied natural science in Paris at the Sorbonne and the Museum of Natural History, was a pupil of the French paleontologist A. Gaudry. From 1919 to 1930 she was a professor at Moscow University and the head of its subdepartment of paleontology. Her principal works were on ungulates. Pavlova’s research on fossil vertebrates was a direct continuation of the work of V. O. Kovalevskii. She described numerous fossil mammalian remains found in what is now the USSR.

Together with her husband A. P. Pavlov, Pavlova founded a geological museum with a large paleontology department at Moscow University. She worked at the museum from 1885 (now the museum of the A. P. Pavlov and M. V. Pavlova Moscow Geological Exploration Institute).

WORKS

Prichiny vymiraniia zhivotnykh v proshedshie geologicheskie epokhi. … Moscow-Petrograd, 1924.
Paleozoologiia, parts 1–2. Moscow-Leningrad, 1927–29.

REFERENCE

Borisiak, A. A., and V. V. Menner. “Mariia Vasil’evna Pavlova.”
Vestnik AN SSSR, 1939, no. 6, pp. 78–80.