Eitan Tchernov

Eitan Tchernov was born in 1935 in Tel Aviv

Tchernov was born in Tel Aviv in 1935, the only child of a poor family in the Florentin neighborhood. As a child he lived with relatives in Ein Vered, where he began to take an interest in birds. As a teenager he joined other youths in a nature club guided by Heinrich Mendelssohn, and there he met his future wife, Ora.

He was not drafted into the IDF because of a heart murmur, and he studied biology at the Hebrew University. He earned a master's degree in 1960 for work on fossil bird bones from prehistoric caves. In 1966 he completed a PhD on mammals from prehistoric sites and became a lecturer.

In 1972 he was a researcher at a paleontology center in Nairobi. He helped found the International Council for Archaeozoology and built a large collection of bones from excavations. In 1991 he founded the Department of Evolution, Systematics and Ecology at the Hebrew University and was its first chairman.

He took part in establishing the Nature Reserves Authority and was its first ranger. He sat on the board of the Society for the Protection of Nature and co-edited the magazine Sevivot from 1986 to 2002. He died of cancer in 2002, leaving his wife Ora and children Dan and Noa.