Alexandre Romanovich Prigogine (12 April 1913, Moscow - 7 May 1991, Brussels) was a Belgian mineralogist and

ornithologist Ornithology is a branch of zoology that concerns the "methodological study and consequent knowledge of birds with all that relates to them." Several aspects of ornithology differ from related disciplines, due partly to the high visibility and th ...

of Russian-Jewish origin. Born into a Jewish family in Moscow, his father Roman (Ruvim Abramovich) Prigogine was a chemical engineer and his mother Julia Vichman, a pianist. His younger brother Ilya Prigogine later won a Nobel Prize in chemistry. In 1921 the family left Russia and travelled through Lithuania and Germany to settle in Belgium in 1929. After studying chemistry at the Université Libre de Bruxelles he moved to the Belgian Congo in 1938 to study its mineral wealth.

Henri Schouteden Henri Schouteden (9 July 1881, Brussels – 15 November 1972, Brussels) was a Belgian zoologist, ornithologist and entomologist who undertook numerous expeditions into the Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi. Works (All in French) *Schouteden, H. (1912). ...

convinced him in 1946 to take an interest in birds and to collect specimens in the east of the Belgian Congo. This new interest led to him publishing 94 papers on ornithology and he collected nearly 20,000 specimens. He described several new species including Albertine owlet (''Glaucidium albertinum''), Kabobo apalis (''Apalis kaboboensis'') and the Itombwe flycatcher (''Muscicapa itombwensis'') and about 30 new subspecies. Congo bay owl (''Pholidus prigoginei''),

Prigogine's nightjar Prigogine's nightjar (''Caprimulgus prigoginei'') or the Itombwe nightjar, is a bird species of tropical central Africa. It is known from only one specimen taken at Malenge in the Itombwe Mountains in Zaire in August 1955.http://www.birdlife.org/d ...

(''Caprimulgus prigoginei''),

Prigogine's double-collared sunbird Prigogine's sunbird or Prigogine's double-collared sunbird (''Cinnyris prigoginei'') is a species of bird in the family Nectariniidae. Taxonomy It is sometimes considered a subspecies of the greater double-collared sunbird (''Cinnyris afer' ...

(''Cinnyris prigoginei'') and Prigogine's greenbul (''Chlorocichla prigoginei'') have been named after him.

References

1913 births 1991 deaths Belgian ornithologists Belgian people of Russian-Jewish descent 20th-century Belgian zoologists Soviet emigrants to Belgium {{ornithologist-stub