Peter Simon Pallas

Peter Simon Pallas was a Prussian zoologist, botanist, geographer and natural historian, born in Berlin in 1741, who worked mainly in the Russian Empire between 1767 and 1810. After studies at Halle, Göttingen and Leiden, where he took his doctorate at nineteen, he published Miscellanea Zoologica in 1766 and was invited by Catherine II to a professorship at the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences. Between 1768 and 1774 he led an expedition through the Volga region, the Urals, Siberia and the Altai as far as Lake Baikal, reported in his journey through various provinces of the Russian Empire, and he later compiled the Flora Rossica and began the Zoographica Rosso-Asiatica. He led a second expedition to southern Russia in 1793 and 1794, was elected a foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in 1776 and died in 1811.