Baldyrgan was born in 1930, the eldest daughter of actor Serali Kozhamkulov, the first Kazakh film star in the early Soviet republic. Despite an early love for the arts, she decided to pursue biological sciences at the newly founded Al-Farabi Kazakh National University (KazGU) in Almaty, Kazakhstan. She continued her post-grad studies in paleontology at the Institute of Zoology at the Kazakh Academy of Sciences under the supervision of Professor Valerian Bazhanova. She is famous for her discovery, as a graduate student, of a complete family of mammoths in 1957 in the village of Volchya Griva in Novosibirsk. This very complete set of skeletons is some of the earliest ever found in Central Asia and now has pride of place at the Institute of Zoology at the Academy of Science in Almaty. She defended her Ph.D. dissertation in 1964 on Pleistocene fauna of Central Asia and remained at the Academy of Sciences, where she rose to the position of Director of the Palaeontology Laboratory within the Institute of Zoology. During her tenure, she directed over 130 excavations and discovered 150 species. She was one of the few academics of her time who published outside of the Soviet Union and was integral in unifying interregional stratigraphies for the Cenozoic.
Post by Ashleigh Haruda
Image from https://www.kazpravda.kz/fresh/view/nerukotvornii-pamyatnik-talantu/ and used with permission.
