The Fish Taimen

         The earliest collection of Mongolian fi shes was made by the German naturalist Peter Simon Pallas in the late 1700s, who described the taimen (Hucho taimen) and the lenok (Brachymystax lenok). Continued exploration in the 1800s led to the description of further fi sh species, notably by B. Dybowski, S. Basilewsky and K. Kessler, and the early 1900s saw the fi rst of numerous studies on the fi shes of Mongolia and Russia by Leo Berg. A number of joint Soviet-Mongolian, Czechoslovakian-Mongolian and German-Mongolian expeditions were carried out in the latter half of the twentieth century, but while providing new collections of fi sh for analysis, they tended to be broad multi-disciplinary studies. However, several specifi c fi sh studies were carried out during the tenure of Prof. A. Dashdorj, the fi rst Mongolian to hold the Chair of Zoology at the Mongolian State University in 1947, as he had a particular interest in ichthyology. The publication of ‘The Fishes of Mongolia’ by G. Baasanjav and Y. Tsendayush in 2001 (published in Mongolian) provided an important taxonomic review of Mongolian fi shes. It also consolidated much of the existing regional biological and fi sheries data. Prior to this, Leo Berg’s ‘Freshwater Fishes of the U.S.S.R. and Adjacent Countries’ (published in Russian, 1949 and English, 1962) was the standard reference to the fi shes of Mongolia.