paleonet Vladimir V. Missarzhevsky

[Stefan Bengtson <stefan.bengtson@xxxxxx>]

Word has just reached us belatedly from Moscow that Vladimir V. 
Missarzhevsky died of cancer in March.

Missarzhevsky was the father of the systematic study of the early 
skeletal faunas that herald the incoming Cambrian biota. The term 
"small shelly fossils" for this bewildering array of shells, 
sclerites, tubes and spicules was coined by himself and Crosbie 
Matthews in a 1975 review paper, which was the first serious 
introduction of his work to the English-reading public. In the 1960s 
he was co-author of the famous Tommotian Stage in Siberia, then 
regarded as the first expression of the Cambrian biota, before the 
appearance of trilobites. His later work was devoted to the 
demonstration that the Tommotian is preceded by a significant 
succession with skeletal biota, which he formalized as the Manykaian 
Stage (approximate equivalent of the Nemakit-Daldynian).

Volodya Missarzhevsky was a gifted and ebullient scientist whose lack 
of diplomatic finesse kept him in the backrooms of Soviet 
palaeontology. Never given the opportunity for international travel 
and exchange, he escaped wide international recognition, but his work 
on the Early Cambrian "small shelly fossils" became one of the 
cornerstones on which the modern revolutionary insights into the 
Cambrian explosion have been built.

-- 
Stefan Bengtson
Senior Curator (invertebrate fossils)
Swedish Museum of Natural History
Department of Palaeozoology
Box 50007
SE-104 05 Stockholm
Sweden

tel. +46-8 5195 4220
      +46-8 732 5218 (home)
fax  +46-8 5195 4184
e-mail stefan.bengtson@nrm.se