Alexandr Pavlovich Rasnitsyn, (palaeo)entomologist extraordinaire – a personal appreciation

This note is not meant to be an exhaustive account of the many achievements of Alex Rasnitsyn over the 75 years of his life thus far. Apart from anything else, I have little knowledge of his activities outside of my professional interactions with him. Also, there will undoubtedly be several other biographical essays this year to celebrate his accomplishments in many fields. So, my intention, after providing the essential details to place him in context, mainly derived from his personal page on the Paleontological Institute’s website (Rasnitsyn 2011) and a note in the Paleontological Journal (Laboratory of Arthropods, 2011), is to give my personal impressions of our interactions, his influence on my own life and work, and on hymenopterology in general. Alexandr Pavlovich Rasnitsyn was born in Moscow, Russia, on 24 September, 1936, and has lived there since. His interest in insects and general natural history soon became apparent, and he joined the Club of Young Biologists at the Moscow Zoo. In 1955 he enrolled at the Moscow State University, and in 1960 graduated with honours and a masters degree in entomology, his thesis being on “Hibernation in the ichneumon flies subfamily Ichneumoninae”, showing that his passion for Hymenoptera was developed right from the start. That same year he joined the Arthropoda Laboratory, headed by Professor Boris Rohdendorf, in the Paleontological Institute of the USSR (now Russian) Academy of Sciences, Moscow. From this start as a young man (Figure 1), he worked his way up sequentially from positions as Technician, Junior and Senior Research Worker, to becoming the Head of the Laboratory (1979–1996), Principal Research Worker (since 1996) and then again Head of the Laboratory (from 2002 after ZooKeys 130: 1–10 (2011)