Vladimir Vasilevich Menner

Born Nov. 11 (24), 1905, in the city of Shatsk, in present-day Riazan’ Oblast. Soviet geologist and paleontologist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1966).

After graduating from Moscow University in 1927, Menner worked in the Moscow division of the Geological Committee from 1927 to 1929. In 1929-30 he was an assistant at the Moscow Academy of Mines. Between 1930 and 1965 he served as dean of the geology department and head of the subdepartment of paleontology of the Moscow Institute of Geological Research. He has been head of the subdepartment of paleontology at Moscow State University since 1965. He became a senior researcher at the Geological Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1934 and assistant director of the institute in 1960. He conducted geological research in the Crimea, Northern Caucasus, the Polar Urals, Bashkiria, Siberia, and Kamchatka, and he wrote works on belemnites, ichthyofauna, and plesiosaurs. Menner developed basic principles for the stratigraphic correlation of deposits having different facies and established that the development of faunas and floras occurs in stages. He initiated work aimed at creating a unified global stratigraphic scale. From 1968 to 1972 he was president of the stratigraphic commission of the International Union of Geological Sciences, and in 1972 he became its vice-president and president of the union’s subcom-mission on the stratigraphy of the Paleogene. A member of the French Geological Society and the Geological Society of London and a recipient of the S. M. Kirov Prize of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1951), Menner has been awarded three orders and various medals.