Peter Yulievich Schmidt attended the gymnasium of KI May before studying at the Physics and Mathematics Faculty ofSt. Petersburg University, from where he graduated in 1895. He was engaged in the laboratory of Professor V.M. Shimkevich and V.T. Shevyakov. He travelled throughSemirechiy in 1899-1902. In 1908-1910 he participated in the Kamchatka expedition of F. P. Ryabushinsky, where he headed the zoological department.[3] In 1906, he was awarded with a gold medal named after Petr Petrovich Semyonov by theImperial Russian Geographical Society.[4]
From 1906 to 1930 he held the position of a professor at the Agricultural Institute in St. Petersburg (Leningrad) and from 1914 to 1931 he worked at the Zoological Museum of theRussian Academy of Sciences. From 1930 to 1949 Schmidt was a scientific secretary to the Pacific Committee of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR.
In 1938 he was arrested. along with a group of other employees of the Zoological Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, by theNKVD because they had non-Russian surnames. Schmidt was suspected of espionage for Germany and Japan on the grounds that he had been on scientific missions in Berlin and Tokyo. After interrogation, during which the 66-year-old professor was knocked out, he signed the protocol as required by the NKVD investigators and also confessed to being an Italian spy, as his daughter lived in Italy. Eventually, he was released and was able to continue his scientific activity.[5]
Until 1900 the main scientific interests of Schmidt were inarachnology, the morphology of the inferiormillipedes and the invertebrate fauna of Semirechiye. Even while he was at university, he received a gold medal for a study of millipedes a gold medal.[6] His best known work came after 1900 when he began to study the fish fauna of the Pacific and Ichthyology in its broader sense. Schmidt was the first zoologist to observe theanabiosis in desiccated earthworms.[7] He translated scientific literature from German into Russian and was the editor of the Russian "Small Biological Encyclopedia".
Schmidt P. Ueber das Leuchten der Zuckmücken Zool. Jahr. , vol. VIII, 1892
Schmidt P. Beiträge zur Kenntn. der niederen Myriapoden Zeit. wis. Zool., LIX, 1895
Schmidt P. Beitrag zur Kenntnis Laufspinnen (Araneae, Citigradae Thor.) Russlands // Zool. Jahrb. Abt. Syst. 1895. Bd. 8. H. 4. S. 439 484.
Materials for the knowledge of the Semirechye region fauna Notes of the West Siberian Branch of the Imperial Russian Geographical Society, 1896 (in Russian)
Pisces of the eastern seas of the Russian Empire, St. Petersburg, 1904 (in Russian)
Marine crafts of Sakhalin Island, St. Petersburg, 1905 (in Russian)
The work of the Zoological Department in Kamchatka in 1908 - 1909. // Kamchatka expedition of Fedor Pavlovich Ryabushinsky ... Russian Geographical. society. Zoological. department, at. 1 M., Printing house of Ryabushinskikh T., 1916 (in Russian)
Anabiosis 1923 (in Russian)
Soulful life of animals and its study. 1929 (in Russian)
The organism among organisms Moscow - Leningrad, Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, 166, [2] c. : ill. 1941 (in Russian)
Pisces of the Pacific Ocean. An outline of modern theories and views on the distribution and development of the fauna of the Pacific fish, Moscow, 1948 (in Russian)
Fish of the Sea of Okhotsk, Moscow, 1950 (in Russian)
^Балушкин А. В. (2003). "Начала Петербургской ихтиологической школы. Письма Л. С. Берга А. Н. Световидову".Труды Зоологического института РАН (in Russian).301:1–95. Source for the original Russian article
^Шмидт П.Ю. (1920). "Анабиоз дождевых червей".Труды Петроградского об-ва естествоиспытателей (in Russian).. 50 (1):1–19.Source for the original Russian article
^Beolens, Bo; Watkins, Michael; Grayson, Michael (2011).The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. xiii + 296 pp.ISBN978-1-4214-0135-5. ("Schmidt, P. Y.", p. 236).
