Matskási István (szerk.): A Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum évkönyve 100. (Budapest 2008)

Korsós, Z.: History of the Herpetological Collection of the Hungarian Natural History Museum

Immediately after FEJÉRVÁRY'S death, in 1933 the Hungarian Natural History Museum was officially formed. However, it only got organisational independence from the National Museum by the Museums' Act in 1949. This law was the first to state that the Hungarian Natural History Museum is to be considered part of the "nationally important museums" and thus, part of our national heritage. Non-museum professionals said also unanimously that the Department of Zoology is actually our "national collection of animals" (DUDICH 1939). However, even this view could not help to find an appropriate location for the collections. ARANKA MÁRIA FEJÉRVÁRYNÉ LÁNGH (1898-1988) graduated from the Pázmány Péter University, Budapest, in 1919; she got her doctorate degree there in the same year. She met FEJÉRVÁRY as a first grade university student. Through FEJÉRVÁRY she became an unpaid trainee in the Herpetological Collection in 1916. In 1917, three days after her first presentation in the Zoological Section of the Royal Hungarian Natural History Society, she married FEJÉRVÁRY (Fig. 20), and was appointed assistant curator of the collection. She became a proper museologist in 1922, and in the next year - 1923 - her 100-page monograph about fossil Ophisaurus was published. In 1924, due to the bad financial situation of the museum and to the fact that FEJÉRVÁRYNÉ'S (= Mrs FEJÉRVÁRY) family's financial circumstances were quite good, she was forced to resign from her paid job, but she could still work there as a volunteer. Preceding this, she offered her private herpetological collection to the Department of Zoology for 1,500 US dollars. In 1928, she participated in a Maltese expedition with her husband, and his friend GYULA KIESELBACH (1891-1972), a chemist. FEJÉRVÁRY died suddenly in 1932, so his wife returned to the museum as a paid employee and took over the leadership of the herpetological collection. She finished and sent to press her husband's five unfinished works, but she did not begun any new, individual research, only wrote popularising texts of high level. She would have liked to write a catalogue of the Hungarian herpetofauna similar to MÉHELY'S Fauna Regni Hungáriáé, and as the first step towards this goal, she published the collection's Hungarian locality data* in her two papers in the museum's journal Fragmenta Faunistica Hungarica in 1943 ( FEJÉRVÁRY-LÁNGH \943a, 1943b). In Table 4 we present here the summary of these papers: the list of the Hungarian species in the collection, with the number of corresponding localities (i.e. the number of samples of that particular species in the collection). We don't know the number of specimens; but from these data at least we can get an idea how large the Hungarian part of the Herpetological Collection has been (1,433 samples of 50 species and subspecies). Since in 1956 practically the entire material, except for the individual inventory cards, was burnt to ash (see below), it can be the subject of a later analysis to work up those records registered in the cardboard catalogue (including collecting details, number of specimens, etc.). Hungary at that time was almost three times larger than today and included entire Transylvania (now part of Romania), the North and West Carpathian Mts (now in Ukraine and Slovakia), the region where the rivers Danube and Tisza join (now in Serbia), and the area to the Adriatic Sea coast (now in Slovenia and Croatia).