Evgeny Kurochkin

Yevgeny Nikolayevich Kurochkin, Russian Евгений Николаевич Курочкин, English transcription Evgeny Kurochkin ( born July 12, 1940 in Moscow, † December 13, 2011 ) was a Russian vertebrate paleontologist and ornithologists, who was considered one of the world's leading experts in Paläornithologie. He was at the Paleontological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.

His first publication resulted in the early 1960s after a six-month stay in the North Pacific and in Murmansk on local seabirds. He was a student of the Russian ornithologist Georgi Petrovich Dementyev ( Dementev, 1898-1969 ), who brought him to Paläornithologie because there was still a great need for research. In 1964 he received his degree in biology at the Moscow State University and he received his doctorate (Candidate items) on functional morphology of the basin of swimming and diving birds in 1968. In 1994 he received the Russian doctorate ( Habilitation ) with a work which summarized his research on the origin of birds.

It addressed, among others, Mesozoic birds of Mongolia (eg Ambiortus dementjevi 1982, Teviornis 2002) and Siberia (eg Mystiornis 2011). Except in the Soviet Union and Mongolia, he was to field work in Cuba and Vietnam. He is known by the sensational discovery of the oldest modern bird type ( with the typical form of modern birds tail and tail feathers ), the crows big Ambiortus, 1982 in the Lower Cretaceous of Mongolia ( approximately 125 million years old ). He showed that the birds only around twenty million years after Archaeopteryx already had very modern features. He is opposed to a lineage of birds from dinosaurs, and instead of a lineage of archosaurs and parallel development with dinosaurs. Archaeopteryx, however, is by Kurochkin a branch of the theropods, but with the actual birds could not compete and extinct, as well as the also extinct Enantiornithes. He was also one of the few prominent supporters of Protoavis by Sankar Chatterjee.

He also advocated the origin of geese ( Anseriformes ) in the Cretaceous.

He was President of the Ornithological Society Menzbier and honorary member of the American Ornithological Union.

Writings

  • With MJ Benton, MA Shishkin, DM Unwin (ed.): The Age of Dinosaurs in Russia and Mongolia. Cambridge University Press 2000
  • The origin of birds (PDF, 1.1 MB), Science in Russia 2009, No.2
  • Article grebes ( Podicipediformes ) and Rails ( Rallidae ) in birds of the USSR (in Russian ), Moscow / Leningrad, Nauka, 1982, 1987 ( German translation: Handbook of the Birds of the Soviet Union, Ziemsen Verlag, Wittenberg, 1985, 1989)
  • Birds of Central Asia in the Pliocene (Russian), Proceedings of the Joint Mongolian- Soviet expedition, Volume 26, 1985, pp. 1-120
  • With IA Bogdanovich: Origin of feathered flight, Paleontological Journal, 44, 2010, pp. 1570-1588.
  • With GJ Dyke: The first fossil owls ( Aves: Strigiformes ) from the Paleogene of Asia and a review of the fossil record of Strigiformes, Paleontological Journal, 45, 2011, 445-458
  • Synopsis of Mesozoic birds and early evolution of class aves, Archaeopteryx, Volume 13, 1995, 47-66.
  • Parallel evolution of theropod dinosaurs and birds, Entomological Review, Volume 86, 2006, Suppl 1, S45- S58.
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