Leo Sheljuzhko

Who was Leo Sheljuzhko?

Leo Andreyevich Sheljuzhko was a Ukrainian-German entomologist who specialized in Lepidoptera. He wrote numerous scientific papers on the butterflies and moths of Central Asia, in Russian, German, and English, and described many new taxa.

He was born in 1890, the son of Andrei Ivanovich Shelyuzhko, a wealthy Ukrainian landowner. He studied at Kyiv University, and after completing his studies in 1912, he opened a business where he exotic plants and animals, the largest in the Russian Empire. He invested the profits in buying specimens of Lepidoptera from collectors, mostly in Central Asia. From 1920, he worked as a curator at the Zoological Museum of Kyiv University. In 1941, he was a curator there, when the city was invaded and occupied by Nazi Germany. Shelyuzhko chose to remain under the German occupation, so as the Red Army approached Kiev, he was forced to flee to Germany, where he remained for the rest of his life, eventually taking West German citizenship. From 1945 to his death in 1969, he was a researcher at the Bavarian State Zoological Collections in Munich.