Pavel Terentev

Born Dec. 10 (23), 1903, in Sevastopol’; died Dec. 30, 1970, in Leningrad. Soviet zoologist.

In 1922, Terent’ev graduated from Moscow University. Beginning in 1934, he taught at Leningrad State University, where he was head of the subdepartment of vertebrate zoology from 1954 to 1965. He also taught at the Zoological Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Terent’ev’s research dealt mainly with the taxonomy and geographic distribution of amphibians and reptiles. Terent’ev also studied theoretical systematics and the application of mathematical methods to biology. After studying variation among diverse animals, he came to the conclusion that the concept of the subspecies is arbitrary. Using amphibians as an example, he was one of the first to apply the law of homologous series to zoology.