Yuri Orlov (zoologist)

Yuri Aleksandrovich Orlov (Russian: Ю́рий Алекса́ндрович Орло́в; June 12, 1893 — October 2, 1966) — was a Russian and Soviet zoologist and paleontologist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union (from 1960, corresponding member since 1953).

His father was Aleksandr Fyodorovich Orlov (1855–1940), member of Narodnaya Volya, official of Udel department of Vologda and Arkhangelsk Governorates. His mother was Vera Pavlovna Tumarkina (1862–1899), from Bessarabian Jewish merchants family, the older sister of Anna Tumarkin. She served as an otolaryngology doctor at Saint Petersburg Conservatory.

Orlov studied zoology and anatomy at the State University of St. Petersburg under Alexei Zavarzin. He then taught from 1916 to 1924 at the Medical Faculty of the University of Perm, during the Russian Civil War turmoil under some very difficult conditions. and from 1924 to 1935 at the Institute for Brain Research and the Military Medical Academy in Leningrad. At that time, he studied the nervous system of arthropods. From 1925, he devoted his research interests to paleontology, the old love of his youth, and joined Aleksei Borisyak. He taught at the Mining Academy in Leningrad and from 1939 at the Lomonosov State University in Moscow.

He was the chief editor of a fifteen-volume series "Fundamentals of paleontology." In 1967, he was awarded the Lenin Prize posthumously.

Director of the Paleontological Institute, The Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1945–1966).

In 1955, he signed a Letter of three hundred against notorious Stalinist Trofim Lysenko.