China Vitae

Biography

Yin Hongfu, male, Han nationality, is a native of Zhoushan, Zhejiang Province. He graduated from the Beijing College of Geoscience in 1956 and received a postgraduate degree from the college in 1961.

Yin Hongfu initiated the research orientation of bio-geology and promoted the entire combination of paleontology and geology. He introduced the discontinuity balance theory, a new theory of catastrophic events, event stratigraphy, proposed the geologic evolvement discontinuity theory, and widely affected the study of extinction events between the Paleozoic and Mesozoic periods. Yin also published the paleoecology textbook and completed the first ecostratigraphy monographs and Chinese paleobiogeography, the latter has been published in Oxford University (in 1994).

In the biogenic mineralizing field, Yin proposed an organism-organic matter-organic fluid mineralizing system. With regard to the pedospherical system, Yin stressed the study of the Changjiang River environment evolution and proposed the non-Wilson cycle, non-Smith stratigraphy and mapping methods. He published the description of almost 300 kinds of fossils, which play an important role in establishing the Triassic period stratum system of Guizhou, Qinghai, and Gaisu.

Yin summarized the Triassic system of China and East Asia, and was the first to propose the new definition of borderline Permian-Triassic systems. He also proposed the volcanic causes of the formation theory of borderline events and, under his leadership, the global boundary stratotype of Permian-Triassic system (gold nail) was defined at Changxing, Zhejiang Province. He has published 21 monographs and 180 papers.

Yin is an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.