Leo Sheljuzhko
Leo Sheljuzhko (Лев Шелюжко) was a Ukrainian-German entomologist who studied butterflies and moths. He was born on 26 September 1890 in Kyiv and died on 22 September 1969 in Munich.
He studied at Kyiv University and, after finishing in 1912, ran a large business selling exotic plants and animals—the biggest in the Russian Empire. He used the profits to buy butterfly and moth specimens and organized expeditions, mainly to Central Asia and the Caucasus.
From 1918, he worked as a curator at the Shcherbak Zoology Museum of the Ukrainian Academy of Sciences. Between 1933 and 1941, he was a curator at the Zoology Museum of Kyiv University, where he built his own Rhopalocera (butterflies) collection.
When Kyiv was occupied by Nazi Germany in 1941, his collection was left in the city by the university because it was deemed not valuable. As the Red Army neared in 1943, he fled to Germany with his specimens, but the rail cars carrying the collection were lost in East Prussia. He arrived in Munich and stayed there for the rest of his life, eventually becoming a West German citizen.
From 1945 to his death in 1969, he worked as a researcher at the Bavarian State Zoological Collections in Munich. He was also an early aquarium hobbyist who bred tropical fish, including piranhas and Callichthys callichthys, in Russia.
In Kyiv, he organized several entomological expeditions to the Pamir Mountains, Armenia, and Dagestan to collect butterflies and describe new species. His work advanced the study of Rhopalocera, and his collection included many specimens of the genera Parnassius and Colias. It is kept at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. During World War II, the collection was lost by the Germans and later recovered by Soviet forces and taken to Moscow; in 1946 it was returned to Kyiv. Today it includes more than 300,000 Lepidoptera specimens.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 12:39 (CET).