Vladimir Beshkov

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Vladimir Atanasov Beshkov (10 September 1935 – 23 October 2019) was a Bulgarian zoologist and expert in reptiles and amphibians. He worked at the Institute of Zoology of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences in Sofia.

Born in Sofia and raised in Svishtov, Beshkov studied biology at Sofia University, graduating in 1959, and began his long career at the Institute of Zoology. In 1978 he earned his doctoral dissertation on the ecological and biological characteristics of snakes in the Maleshevo Mountain and retired in 1995 as an associate professor.

Beshkov was a leading figure in Bulgarian herpetology. He studied the snakes of Maleshevo, a region home to about two-thirds of the country’s snake species. He also discovered the seasonal vertical migration of the common frog (Rana temporaria) at Muhalnitsa near Botevgrad, a site that became Bulgaria’s first protected area dedicated to preserving an amphibian. His work on the Greek stream frog (Rana graeca) and his broader research on Bulgaria’s amphibians and reptiles helped improve knowledge and created distribution models for these species.

From the late 1970s he campaigned to protect Bulgaria’s turtles and later other reptiles and amphibians, influencing protective laws. He contributed to the amphibians and reptiles sections of the first and second editions of the Red Book of Bulgaria. He also served as a consultant for popular science wildlife films and received international recognition for his work.

Beshkov was an avid cave explorer, collaborating with Prof. Peter Beron to explore and, in some cases, discover caves around the world. He published 83 scientific papers on the taxonomy, ecology, biology, and distribution of Bulgarian bats, amphibians, and reptiles. Through his travels, he collected many invertebrates. A genus of cave beetles, Beskovia, and 12 species and subspecies across various groups were named in his honor. His son, Stoyan Beshov, is an entomologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Sofia.