Founder and long-standing director of the Natural History Museum, originally the Museum of Natural Sciences, or the Museum of the Serbian Land, today the Natural History Museum. He was one of the first students of Jovan Žujović and later became one of his most successful collaborators and a long-standing personal friend. Pavlović dedicated three fossil species new to science to Žujović: Frondicularia zujovicana, Unio zujovici, and Viviparus zujovici. Through his study of paleontological material from the Lower Congerian strata in the valley of the Karagača stream near Vrčin, as well as Upper Pontian mollusks from Grgeteg, Orešac, and Beli Potok, he described three new marine species of foraminifera, the new gastropod genera Beogradica and Odonthohydrobia, 57 new Caspian-brackish species, and 87 freshwater lacustrine mollusk species.