Stensio, Erik Anderson

Stensiö, Erik Anderson 

Born Oct. 2, 1891, in Stensiö, Döderhult, Kalmar Län (County). Swedish paleontologist. Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (1927). Foreign member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1929).

Stensiö was a professor and director of the department of pa-leozoology at the Swedish Museum of Natural History from 1923 to 1933 and from 1936 to 1959. He primarily studied Silurian and Devonian armored fish and Agnatha. He established the relationship between ostracoderms and modern cyclostomes and between placoderms and elasmobranches. Stensiö’s studies of the Triassic fish of Spitsbergen and Greenland proved that modern acipensers descended from the ancient ganoids—the palaeonis-cids. He showed that not only the skeletal structure but also the nervous, circulatory, and other systems may be studied in fossil armored Agnatha.

REFERENCES

Berg, L. S. “Sistema ryboobraznykh i ryb, nyne zhivushchikh i iskopaemykh.” Moscow-Leningrad, 1940. (Trudy Zoologiches-kogo in-ta AN SSSR, vol. 5, fasc. 2.)
Obruchev, D. V. “Sovremennye teorii evoliutsii nizshikh pozvonochnykh.” In Sovremennye problemy paleóntologa. Moscow, 1971. (Trudy Paleontologicheskogo in-ta, vol. 130.)