Russian paleontologist Yuri Bolotsky has died at the age of 68.

Russian paleontologist Yuri Bolotsky, who discovered the country's first complete dinosaur skeleton, died in Blagoveshchensk at the age of 69. The death of the researcher was announced on July 1 at the Institute of Geology and Environmental Management of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IGiP FEB RAS).

"Yuri Leonidovich Bolotsky, Candidate of Geological and Mineralogical Sciences, vice—president of the International Asian Dinosaur Association (ADA), veteran of the Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, head of the Laboratory of Paleontology at IGiP Far Eastern Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, organizer and head of scientific research in the field of paleontology in the Far East, has died," the institute's press service wrote on the Telegram channel.

Bolotsky has devoted more than 40 years to studying the Cretaceous period of East Asia. Under his leadership, scientists described four new genera and species of duckbilled dinosaurs, and also determined the composition of the Amur Region fauna aged 65-67 million years, which included dinosaurs, crocodiles, turtles and mammals.

IGiP noted that with Bolotsky's direct participation, the world's first avian dinosaur was described at the Kulinda location in the Chita region. This sensational study was published in the journal Science, it became a significant contribution to the study of the evolution of dinosaurs and caused a great response in the international scientific community. In total, the scientist has written more than 100 scientific papers.

The collection collected by the paleontologist is one of the largest in Russia and unique on a global scale. Based on it, a paleontological museum was opened in Blagoveshchensk in 1997, organized and first headed by Bolotsky himself.

Bolotsky was born in 1958 in Zheleznogorsk and has been interested in paleontology since childhood. In 1980, he graduated from the Yaroslavl Pedagogical Institute and went to the Amur region, where he worked as a teacher, and then entered the graduate school of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 2011-2012, he returned to his hometown to work with the remains of the ichthyosaur Platypterygia, found in the Mikhailovsky quarry. Bolotsky studied paleontology with his family, his wife Natalia Vasilyevna and son Ivan.