摘要
回顾和总结了杨式溥教授一生为中国地质学和古生物学所做出的重要贡献。以其公开发表的论著为基础 ,论述了杨式溥在中国石炭纪地层学、腕足动物化石、古遗迹学以及古生态学等研究领域的贡献 ,并简要评述了他的学术思路和治学特色。杨式溥对中国西北和西南地区石炭纪的腕足动物化石的研究为中国石炭纪地层的内部界线划分、对比、化石组合、地理区系及沉积类型提供了重要证据。杨式溥是中国古生态学和古遗迹学的奠基人 ,他全面系统地引入了古生态学的概念与方法 ,并在全国高校首次开设了有关课程。他对中国各时代、不同沉积相中的遗迹化石的系统描述和遗迹相的研究开拓了中国古生物学的新领域。杨式溥执教半个多世纪 ,为中国地质和古生物事业培养了大批专门人才。文后附有以出版年代为序的杨式溥所著文献的完整目录。
December 13th, 2002 was a black Friday for the Chinese geology and paleontology community, which lost an eminent scientist and a respectful educator while I lost my father——Professor Shipu Yang who passed away in Beijing at age 77 due to a sudden heart attack. In his more than half a century's scientific and educational career, Professor Yang made significant contributions to Chinese geology and paleontology, especially in the fields of fossil brachiopods, Carboniferous biostratigraphy, paleobiogeography, and paleoecology. He pioneered the research on Chinese trace fossils and laid out the foundation for the development of paleoichnology and its applications in China. Professor Yang was born in Xingtang of Hebei Province in northern China. He started his geology career shortly after his graduation from the Department of Geology at the Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1950. He obtained his graduate degree from the Moscow University in Russia in 1959 and began his research interests on the systematics of Carboniferous fossil brachiopods and marine paleoecology. His early work on Lower Carboniferous brachiopods from north Xinjiang of northwestern China and Guizhou Province of southwestern China established new standards for Lower Carboniferous biostratigraphy in this country. He was well known among overseas colleagues about his work on the geology and stratigraphy of Chinese Lower Carboniferous rocks, and most of these works were published before 1965 (Text fig.1,2). After the ten year hiatus due to the “Cultural Revolution,” he refocused his brachiopod research on material collected from the Tibetan Plateau and published a series of papers dealing with paleobiogeography of Chinese Carboniferous biotas. He was responsible for introducing theory and concepts of Paleoecology to Chinese colleagues in the early 1960s. He applied the methods and techniques he acquired during his study in Russia into paleoecological investigations of both marine and terrestrial paleoecosystems in China by analyzing paleocommunities as well as paleoautocology of Paleozoic brachiopod genera. In his research, he emphasized the importance of original data and stressed that stratigraphic interpretations and paleoenvironmental reconstructions must rest on the solid foundation of accurate fossil taxonomy. Systematic descriptions and paleoenvironmental interpretations of Chinese trace fossils became a major direction of Professor Yang's research during his later years. Among the 54 fossil sites from which his original fossil materials were collected (Text fig.1), more than half were dealing with trace fossils. He described Chinese trace fossils from lacustrine, shallow marine, and deep sea deposits and studied Precambrian metazoan traces as well as special cases on the paleobiology of Zoophycus and Cruziana . His latest book, “The Trace Fossils of China,” completed just one week before his passing, provided a comprehensive treatment of paleoichnofacies and included all trace fossils described in China before 2000. His efforts made paleoichnology a valuable tool in both paleontological and sedimentological fields in China. In addition to his original research, Professor Yang taught geology and paleontology at the China University of Geosciences throughout his life. He was the first to create paleoecology courses in Chinese higher education and edited and translated some textbooks ranging from “Introduction to Paleontology” to “Principles of Paleoecology”. Throughout the years, he supervised more than twenty graduate students and was responsible for the founding of the Paleoecology Committee under the Paleontological Society of China. At personal level, he generated my interests in science and was largely responsible for my choosing geology and evolutionary biology as my career. In my memory, he was a wonderful father, a respectful scholar, and an ultimate mentor. Paleontology was his life long joy, and he worked on fossils to the very last day of his life. Professor Yang will be remembered by the history of Chinese geology and
出处
《古生物学报》
CAS
CSCD
北大核心
2003年第4期627-636,共10页
Acta Palaeontologica Sinica
