AWARDEE OF EARTH SCIENCES PRIZE

YANG ZUNYI

Abstract

Prof.Yang Zunyi,both a paleontologist and stratigrapher,was born in Jiyang County,Guangdong Province on Oct.7,1908.After his graduation from Tsinghua University with a B.S in Earth Sciences in June 1933,he had served in the same department as an assistant for two years before he got a fellowship of boxer indemnity fund through a nation-wide competitive examination,thus enabling him to go to Yale University to pursue his graduate program in paleontology and stratigraphy under the late Professor Carl.O.Dunbar.He got his Ph.D.in May 1939,and returned to China by late September and was offered professorship and head in the Department of Geology,Sun Yatsan University,and concurrently director of the Geological Survey of Guangdong and Guangsi.In the next year the whole university together with its personnel was moved to Pingshi,northern Guangdong Province.Yang terminated his teaching in July,1942 to join a British Army unit stationed in China unit until the surrender of the Japanese Army.By the late Fall of 1946 he rejoined the Tsinghua faculty as professor of the Department of Earth Sciences,where he had worked three full years before his transfer with the Department to form the newly organized Beijing College of Geology (now the China University of Geosciences).Here he helped organize the first Specialty of Paleontology and Stratigraphy in 1960;in 1962 he opened the first biostratigraphy course in China; the first college textbook of paleontology he and his colleagues compiled in 1957 was rewritten under the editorship of Yang and Hou Yichun in 1980,which was rated by the State Commission of Education as one of the excellent texts for higher education;so far several hundreds of paleontologists trained under Yang and his colleagues are working all over the country;in 1991 Yang was rated an outstanding professor by both the Beijing Municipality and the State Commission of Education.
Yang has been interested in quite a number of invertebrate phyla,more so in Devonian,Permian,Triassic,and Jurassic brachiopods,then molluscs,echinodermates and arthropods.His materials came from different parts of the country-Central Guizhou;the Qilianshan Mts in Qinghai;Jiuquan,Gansu;north,south and west Xizang;Sichuan,Yunnan provinces.
Since 1983 when Yang led the IGCP project 203(1983-1988) he has been enthusiatically working on event stratigraphy at the Paleozoic-Mesozoic transition and continuously published their teamwork results,e.g.“Permo-Triassic Boundary Strata and Faunas of South China”(1987),“Permo-Triassic Events of South China”(1991,1993),“Permo-Triassic Events in the Eastern Tethys”(1992),the Permian-Triassic boundary:the global stratotype section and point (GSSP)(1995),and “Late Paleozoic and Early Mesozoic Circum-Pacific Events and Their Global Correlation”(1997).All of these works serve sufficiently to support the choice of the Meishan section in Changxing,Zhejiang Prov.,China as the GSSP.
Yang Zunyi is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences elected in 1980,deputy-chairman of the Paleontological Society of China (3rd term,1979～1984),standing councilor of the Geological Society of China (now honorary councilor),deputy-ahairman (now honorary chairman) of the Geological Society of Beijing;formerly in the editorial board of Science in China (Series D) and Chinese Science Bulletin;now editor of Acta Geologica Sinica,Earth Science,and Geoscience,and editor in chief of Stratigraphy and Paleontology,member of the Gondwana Symposium,Permian and Triassic subcommittee and Permo-Triassic Boundary Working Group,all under the International Union of Geological Societies.