Evdokia Reshetnik

Evdokia Reshetnik was a Ukrainian zoologist and ecologist. She was a specialist in the mole-rats and ground squirrels of Ukraine, and was the first scientist to describe the sandy blind mole-rat of southern Ukraine in 1939. She played a key role in keeping the National Museum of Natural History at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine operable in the inter-war and immediate post-war periods, in spite of arrests by both the Gestapo and Soviet authorities. She was one of the people involved in hiding specimens of the museum to prevent them being taken by the Germans. She is known for arguing that ecology, species distribution, populations, utility, and variability, should be weighed before making determinations that labeled certain animals as pests and harmful to the environment. Though she was responsible for maintaining the historiography of scientific development in Ukraine, her own legacy was lost until the twenty-first century.