Dinosaurs from the quarry: a history of the first studies of dinosaurs in the amur region (1949–1951)

The article attempts to reconstruct the history of discovery of one the richest Cretaceous dinosaur excavation sites in Russia, situated in the Blagoveschensk locality in the Amur Oblast, based on the materials of the state, personal, and museum archives, and on information from the periodicals. Analysis of the archive materials allowed to identify the individuals involved in this discovery and in the studies of this dinosaur site. These include: Igor Bastrykin, a schoolboy who made the initial discovery; geologists and paleontologists A. Z. Lazarev, A. K. Rozhdestvenskii, N. S. Shevyreva, and V. A. Presnyakov; military man P. I. Bastrykin; museum staff members G. S. Novikov-Daurskii and A. G. Udod; and a teacher at a higher education institution, F. S. Shavrin. The correspondence of G. S. Novikov-Daurskii, a renowned local historian, and the reports prepared by the geologist A. Z. Lazarev and the paleontologist A. K. Rozhdestvenskii helped to reconstruct the historical and cultural environment in which the first paleontological studies were carried out in 1949–1951. The analysis of the sources allowed establishing that the investigation of the region by scientific and local studies’ societies in 1859–1951 paved the way for the successful paleontological research in the Amur Region in the 1980s – 2020s.