Peter Simon Pallas (1741-1811). Zoographia rosso-asiatica Petropoli: In officina Caes. Academiae Scientarum Impress., 1831. 3 vols. Ellis Aves D424

Peter Simon Pallas (1741-1811). Zoographia rosso-asiatica Petropoli: In officina Caes. Academiae Scientarum Impress., 1831. 3 vols. Ellis Aves D424

By Nature Wise... Peter Simon Pallas was German born and studied in Germany, the Netherlands, and Great Britain before he came to St. Petersburg at age 26, and a year later was leading (with Falk and Delisle) an expedition as a member of the Academy of Sciences, through central Russia, the Lower Volga, the Caspian lowland, Altai, Lake Baikal, and Trans-Baikalia, collecting geographical, botanical, geological, paleontological, zoological and ethnological data. He discovered and described many new species of animals and plants, including this owl, and many animals and plants have been named after him. He was the first to depict the relationships between animals in the form of a family tree. In his Zoographia rosso-asiatica he summarized the many 18th century expeditions. Today, one of the largest ornithological collections, so important for taxonomy, morphology and zoogeography, is St. Petersburg's Zoological Institute of the Academy of Sciences. This volume, plus many more by Pallas, are from our own Ellis collection of natural history consisting of 15,000 bound volumes as well as pamphlets, letters, original drawings, and manuscripts, one third of which is ornithological in nature, with another third of travel literature, mostly scientific voyages and travels. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia lists 3 species of the genus Strix in the former USSR: S. alvco (tawny owl), S. uralensis (Ural owl), and S. nebulosa (Great or Lapp owl). Unless the nomenclature has changed for one of these and it wasn't really first described by Pallas, this would be a 4th species, S. barbata.

Ellis Aves D424