The life and scientific heritage of Leonid Sergeyevich Glickman (1929–2000)

Abstract

This paper consists of biographical data for well-known Soviet palaeoichthyologist Leonid S. Glickman (1929–2000). His life is divided into several stages: a childhood and evacuation during WWII (1929–1945), life in Saratov (1945–1950), Leningrad stage (1950–1970), working in the Russian Far East (1970–1982) and his life in Leningrad / Saint Petersburg (1982–2000). The Leningrad stage (1950–1970) was his most productive time in a scientific sense. During that time he carried out extensive field work, laid a basis of the largest collection of fossil shark teeth in the USSR (now deposited in the State Darwin Museum in Moscow) and wrote 60% of his scientific publications including the monograph “Sharks of Paleogene...” (1964a) and a section on Elasmobranchii in the volume of “Fundamentals of Paleontology” (1964b). In total, Glickman had published 42 papers (excepting dissertations, his thesis and an archive report), including two major monographs (1964a, 1980), two collective ones (1964b, 1987) as well as 33 other scientific papers. He had described nine families, 27 genera and more than 50 species and subspecies of elasmobranch fishes (mainly Lamniform sharks) from the Cretaceous and Cenozoic deposits of territory of the former Soviet Union. His large collections and his ability to think innovatively, allowed him to make some radical changes in shark systematics as well as to demonstrate their use in regional and global biostratigraphy. Four genera and four species of fossil sharks and rays as well as one species of Tertiary hamster from the Aral Sea region have been named in his honour.