Forgotten names: herpetologist Boris Vladimirovich Pestinskiy

Boris Pestinskiy was the herpetologist whose name, unfortunately, is lost in history. We decided to restore justice, and in this article we describe the life of this remarkable person. He was really engaged both in painting and in herpetology. After graduating from the Academy of Arts in Leningrad he wrote mainly the portraits of his contemporaries, illustrated magazines, taught children to draw. Some of his paintings were placed in the Russian Museum. He also studied reptiles. He was devoted to Middle Asia and spent the main part of his life in Tashkent. In Tashkent’s zoo he organized the department of reptiles and on the base of it the first in Middle Asia serpentarium. There poison was regularly taken from venomous snakes. Boris studied snakes’ biology, methods of their capture, conditions of their keeping in captivity, organization of the work of the serpentarium. His students were the young men who later became prominent Russian biologists.