Home > Peter Simon Pallas

Pallas was born at Berlin, the son of a Professor of Surgery. He studied with private tutors and took an interest in natural history, later attending the University of Halle and the University of Göttingen. In 1760 he moved to the University of Leiden and passed his doctor's degree at the age of nineteen.

He travelled throughout the Netherlands and to London, improving his medical and surgical knowledge. He then settled at The Hague, and his new system of animal classification was praised by Cuvier. He wrote Miscellania Zoologica (1766), which included the descriptions of several vertebrates new to science which he had discovered in the Dutch museum collections. A planned voyage to southern Africa and the East Indies fell through when his father recalled him to Berlin. Here he began work on his Spicilegia Zoologica (1767-80).

In 1767 Pallas was invited by Catherine II of RussiaCatherine the Great Catherine II II Yekaterina II Alekseyevna ( April 21, 1729 November 6, 1796), born Sophie Augusta Fredericka and usually known in English as Catherine the Great reigned as empress of Russia from June 28, 1762 to her death in 1796. to became a professor at the St Petersburg Academy of Sciences, and between 1769 and 1774 he led an expedition to SiberiaSiberia ( Russian: , common English transliterations: Sibir Sibir' is a vast region of Russia and northern Kazakhstan, constituting all of northern Asia, and extending eastward from the Ural Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, and southward from the Arctic Oc collecting natural history specimens on their behalf. He explored the upper AmurThe Amur ( Russian: Aiod) ( Simplified Chinese: ; Traditional Chinese: ; literally meaning "Black Dragon River") ( Manchu: Sahaliyan Ula literal meaning "Black River") is one of the world's ten largest rivers. Flowing in northeast Asia for over 4400 km (2, the Caspian SeaThe Caspian Sea is a landlocked sea in Asia. It is bordered by Russia ( Dagestan, Kalmykia, Astrakhan Oblast), Republic of Azerbaijan, Iran ( Guilan, Mazandaran and Golestan provinces), Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, with the central Asian steppes to the n, and the UralThe Ural Mountains ( Russian: also known simply as the Urals are a mountain range that run roughly north and south through western Russia. The Urals extend 2500 km from the Kazakh steppes along the northern border of Kazakhstan to the coast of the Arctic and Altai mountains, reaching as far eastward as Lake BaikalLake Baikal ( Russian: Ozero Baykal ), a lake in southern Siberia, Russia, between Irkutsk Oblast on the northwest and Buryatia on the southeast, near Irkutsk. Being 636 km long and 80 km wide, it is the largest freshwater lake in Asia ( 31,494 km²) and t.

Between 1793 and 1794 he led a second expedition to southern Russia, visiting the Crimea and the Black Sea.

In 1772 Pallas was shown a 700 kilogram lump of metal which had been found near to the city of Krasnoyarsk. Pallas arranged for it to be transported back to St Petersburg. Subsequent analysis of the metal showed that it was a new type of stony-iron meteorite. This new type of meteorites are called Pallasite s after him whereas the meteorite itself is today named Krasnoyarsk or sometimes also called Pallas Iron (the name given to it by Ernst Chladni in 1794).

A number of animals are named after him, including Pallas's Cat, Pallas's Warbler, Pallas's Gull, Pallas's Sandgrouse and Pallas's Reed Bunting.