Sushkin, Petr

Sushkin, Petr Petrovich 

Born Jan. 27 (Feb. 8), 1868, in Tula; died Sept. 17, 1928, in Kislovodsk; buried in Leningrad. Soviet zoologist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1923). Student of M. A. Menzbir.

Sushkin graduated from Moscow University in 1889. In 1910 he became a professor at the University of Kharkov, and in 1919, a professor at Tavrida University in Simferopol’. In 1921 he became a staff member of the Geological and Zoological museums of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He became academician-secretary of the academy’s division of physics and mathematics in 1927.

Sushkin’s main works dealt with ornithology, zoogeography, comparative anatomy, and paleontology. During numerous expeditions to Bashkiria, Kazakhstan, and the mountains of Southern Siberia, Sushkin collected abundant material on the taxonomy, biology, and geographic distribution of birds. His zoo-geographic summaries, and particularly his works on the Minusinsk Basin and the Altai, were important contributions to an understanding of the history of Siberian fauna.

Sushkin worked out in detail the taxonomy of the order Falconiformes and the family Fringillidae. His works on paleontology dealt mainly with the history of land vertebrates and their ancestors, the stegocephalians and theriodonts.

REFERENCES

Dement’ev, G. P. Petr Petrovich Sushkin. Moscow, 1940. (Contains bibliography.)
Puzanov, I. I. “Osnovopolozhniki russkoi zoogeografii (N. A. Severtsov—M. A. Menzbir—P. P. Sushkin).” In Trudy soveshchaniia po istorii estestvoznaniia 24–26 dekabria 1946 g. Moscow-Leningrad, 1948. Pages 286–98.