Citizenship Russian Education Heidelberg University Name Alexander Kovalevsky | Known for Gastrulation Nationality Polish Fields Embryology | |
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Alma mater University of Heidelberg Died 1901, Saint Petersburg, Russia | ||
AMAZING STAR WARS MURAL
Alexander Onufrievich Kovalevsky (Polish: Aleksander Kowalewski, 7 November 1840 in Vārkava, Vitebsk Governorate (present-day Vārkava Municipality, Latvia) – 1901), also written Alexander Kowalevsky, was a Russian embryologist of Polish descent, who studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg and became professor at St Petersburg.
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Discoveries
Kowalevsky showed that all animals go through a period of gastrulation.
Kovalevsky discovered that tunicates were not molluscs, but that their larval stage had a notochord and pharyngeal slits, like vertebrates. Further, these structures developed from the same germ layers in the embryo as the equivalent structures in vertebrates, so he argued that the tunicates should be grouped with the vertebrates as chordates. 19th century zoology thus converted embryology into an evolutionary science, connecting phylogeny with homologies between the germ layers of embryos, foreshadowing evolutionary developmental biology.