Feodosii Nikolaevich Chernyshev

Born Sept. 12 (24), 1856, in Kiev; died Jan. 2 (15), 1914, in St. Petersburg. Russian geologist and paleontologist. Academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1909).

Chernyshev studied at the Marine School, and in 1880 he graduated from the Mining Institute in St. Petersburg. In 1882 he began working on the Geological Committee, becoming its director in 1903. Beginning in 1900, he was also director of the Geological Museum of the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg.

Chernyshev worked out the stratigraphy of the Paleozoic deposits of the Urals, which served as the basis for subdividing synchronous formations in the arctic, the Altai, Middle Asia, and elsewhere. As a result of his studies of the circumpolar region (Timan, Novaia Zemlia, and Spitzbergen), Chernyshev compiled a series of paleontological surveys of Devonian and Upper Carboniferous fauna (1889–1901). He completed a petrographic study of the eastern slopes of the Urals, as a result of which he concluded that the schists of the region were metamorphosed Silurian and Devonian sedimentary rocks. Chernyshev believed that the structure of the Urals formed under the influence of tangential forces that caused dislocations in the latitudinal and northeasterly directions, characteristic of all of Northern Europe. A geological survey of the Donets Coal Basin was begun under Chernyshev’s direction in 1892.

A ridge in the Polar Urals and a mountain range in Transbaikalia have been named after Chernyshev, as well as a glacier and a mountain on Novaia Zemlia and a bay on the Taimyr Peninsula.