Matskási István (szerk.): A Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum évkönyve 86. (Budapest 1994)

Dely, O. Gy.: In commemoration of the centenary of Géza Gyula Fejérváry's birth

when his first publication of nearly 50 pages appeared in German about the herpetofauna of the Rhône Valley. Two years later in one of his further publications, written in French, he discussed a theoretical problem and proposed the simplification of the systematical nomenclature. Besides Hungarian he spoke seven other languages and studied very diligently the Hungarian and international herpetological literature. Visiting the noble relations of the family he got acquainted with the lands and people of Austria, Switzerland, Italy and France. By 1912, when he did his final examination in grammar school, he had published ten papers in Hungarian, German and Swiss journals. In the same year he became a student of the Budapest University, where he studied zoology and for some time medicine, too, especially anatomy. He was very interested in the lectures of Prof. GÉZA ENTZ sen. who discussed for his students the unsolved problems of mimicry, mentioning examples from herpetology. One year later, in 1913, as a first-year student of the university he became a voluntary assistant in the Zoological Department of the Hungarian National Museum. He functioned in this institution as a collaborator of the famous Hungarian zoologist, LAJOS MÉHELY, who was at that time one of the most excellent Hungarian evolutionists. MÉHELY'S aim was to give a causal analysis for the morphological and functional phenomena of the animal kingdom. FEJÉRVÁRY held his first scientific lecture on 15th March 1915 in the Zoological Section of the Hungarian Society of Natural Sciences under the title "Data to the knowledge of the frog species Rana méhelyi". Particularly the bones of this vast fossil frog were described by him and compared with the same bones of other related species. He also pointed out the phylogenetic relations all of these forms. He raised the question whether DEPÉRET'S rule can be applied to the brown frogs, too. Immediately after MÉHELY'S appointment to university professor, in September 1915 FEJÉRVÁRY took over officially the curatorship of the herpetological collections of the Museum's zoological department. But MÉHELY, the newly appointed professor of zoology invited him as an assistant to the Zoological Institute of the University led by himself. FEJÉRVÁRY became an assistant before ending his studies at the Budapest University. It was there that he met among the young students his future wife and co-worker in herpetology, ARANKA MÁRIA LÁNGH. In spite of being deeply impressed by MÉHELY'S personality, to keep his own individuality, immediately after graduating, already in the year 1916 he returned to the Zoological Department of the Hungarian National Museum. And now as an appointed assistant of the Museum he took over officially also the management of the herpetological collection (his future wife had also worked in this collection as a voluntary assistant since October 1916). In 1917 FEJÉRVÁRY earned the doctoral degree. His doctoral dissertation contains the-description of a new frog species found among the osteological remains originating from the layers lying between the Pliocene and Pleistocene near Püspökfürdő. This new fossil frog species was described by him in honour of his future wife as Pliobatrachus langhae. Having analyzed the osteological character of this fossil frog, he concluded that a close relationship existed between the new species and the Bufonidae. On 5th October of the same year he married ARANKA MÁRIA LÁNGH. The monography about the fossil Varanus and Megalania species published by him in the Annales Musei Nationalis Hungarici in 1918 excited great interest among the herpetologists both at home and abroad. The comparative osteological investigations carried out on 13 extinct and 24 recent Varanus species from different regions and completing the osteological data with the palaeogeographical, palaeoclimatological and palaeobotanical as well as recent ones led FEJÉRVÁRY to a conclusion about the origin of Varanidae species which was quite opposite to the one formerly accepted by the herpetologists. On the basis of the above-mentioned data FEJÉRVÁRY concluded that the Varanus species had migrated in the past not from the East, i.e. from Asia, to Europe, and to the whole Old World and Australia but, on the contrary, they had