120th anniversary of Dimitry Vladimirovich Obruchev (26.07.1900-21.12.1970): Scientific heritage and Obruchev scientific school

An outstanding Russian scientist Dmitry Vladimirovich Obruchev started his palaeoichthyological research in the late 1920s and almost all his life worked in the Palaeontological Institute of the Academy of Sciences of USSR. His works are devoted to various early vertebrates, mainly placoderms and agnathans, as well as biostratigraphy of Devonian deposits of the Main and Central Devonian fields, Donbass, Urals and Siberia. Paleoichthyological data accumulated by him became the basis for a volume on agnathans and fishes in the multivolume handbook “Fundamentals of Paleontology”. This has become a reference book for several generations of palaeontologists. In parallel with his scientific work, Obruchev was engaged in the education of new palaeoichthyologists. His students brought up the scientists of the third, and those already of the fourth generation of Obruchev’s successors in Russia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belarus. The works of the students of the Obruchev palaeoichthyological school are devoted to a wide range of issues of palaeontology of Paleozoic vertebrates and biostratigraphy.