Oleg Bogdanov

Oleg Pavlovich Bogdanov was born on 26 March 1925. He began his scientific career at Samarkand State University and later worked at the Institute of Zoology of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan. He spent most of his life in Tashkent.

Bogdanov took part in expeditions in every Central Asian republic and worked in the Zeravshan valley in the 1950s. His research was unusually wide, ranging from arthropods to mammals, including the amphibians, reptiles and birds of Central Asia. His monograph on bats appeared in 1953 in the series Fauna of the Uzbek SSR; in the following decades he wrote on reptiles for that series and for the Fauna of the Turkmen SSR.

According to the available accounts, he set up the first snake nursery in Central Asia, developed methods for keeping and breeding snakes and for safely collecting venom from snakes and scorpions, and identified a new species of bat. Besides scholarly books such as The Ecology of Reptiles of Central Asia and Lizards of Central Asia, he wrote popular-science books and books for children; Animals of Uzbekistan was reprinted many times.

He was deputy chairman of the dissertation council at the Institute of Zoology of the Academy of Sciences of Uzbekistan, supervised more than twenty candidate and doctoral dissertations, and belonged to societies of zoologists and herpetologists in the USA, Germany and France.

He died in Tashkent on 6 November 2007 and was buried at the Botkin Cemetery. The Bogdanov's thin-toed gecko (Tenuidactylus bogdanovi) is named after him, and in September 2025 the Institute of Zoology in Tashkent held a scientific conference marking the centenary of his birth.