He served as the Russian consul general in New York City during the American Civil War, living in the United States from 1856 to 1877.

[citation needed] He took an interest in insects at the age of eleven through the influence of Joseph N. Schatiloff, a Russian coleopterist.

[1] In 1849 he joined the Imperial Foreign Office and while still in Russia he published his first entomological papers, including an account of the species found in the suburbs of St.

During his two-month trip to America, he visited some of Europe’s leading entomologists, including Hermann August Hagen, then living in Konigsberg.

In the mid-1860s Osten Sacken helped Hagen secure a position at Harvard, where he became the first entomologist in the United States to hold the formal title, Professor of Entomology.

In 1862 Osten-Sacken published, with assistance from Hermann Loew, “Catalogue of the described Diptera of North America” in Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Vol.