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

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

With the death of DELY, a great era has ended in the history of the Herpetological Collection of the Hungarian Natural History Museum. DELY was the last classic Hungarian museologist herpetologist (KORSÓS 2004b), who did his examinations mainly on the material preserved in the collection using a microscope and morphological analyses. He incredibly respected his predecessors (MÉHELY, BOLKAY, FEJÉRVÁRY), and by the thoughts he learned from their papers - his thoroughness, his exact observations and descriptions, his pragmatic explanations and his careful evaluation - he deserves to be mentioned on the same level with them. He respected and loved the reflections of the former periods of zoological activities, as well as the professional literature, until the end of his life. He was constantly collecting data to write the history of Hungarian herpetology, but at the end, he only left a few notebook pages about it (Fig. 48). Although he was not "born" to be a herpetologist, he treated the animal group, which was assigned to him after the war - amphibians and reptiles - as his "own animals", and he took care of the collection and this branch of science very enthusiastically, always keeping his duties in mind. By the end of his life, the role of museums in culture has changed worldwide. The purpose of natural history museums - especially with regards to the vertebrates - was no longer the accumulation of dead material and the documentation of the fauna, but rather to play a role as a zoological research center, which provides indispensable information on the biology of species and their conservation also by examination of living populations. In the light of this role-change, the Herpetological Collection of the 200-year-old Hungarian Natural History Museum came to the threshold of a new era. Acknowledgements - The following persons kindly provided data and gave helpful comments during different stages of the preparation of the manuscript: DIÁNA CSEKE, GÁBOR CSORBA, LÁSZLÓ FORRÓ, ISTVÁN MATSKÁSI, FERENC MÉSZÁROS, GYŐZŐ SZÉL (HNHM, Department of Zoology, Budapest), JUDIT VÖRÖS (present Curator of Herpetological Collection, HNHM, Department of Zoology, Budapest), ÉVA LENGYEL, ANGÉLA MATUSZKA, GÁBOR PAPP (HNHM, Department of Library, Budapest), GÁBOR PAPP (HNHM, Department of Geology and Paleontology), WOLFGANG BÖHME (Museum und Forschungsinstitut Alexander Koenig, Bonn), JÓZSEF BÜKI (Ministry of Environment and Water, Budapest), ISTVÁN BECKERT, MÁRIÓ BURGETTI, ÁGNES DELY-DRASKOVITS, LÁSZLÓ KRECSÁK, ANDRÁS SEVCSIK (Budapest), CSABA HORVÁTH (Sopron), GYÖRGY SlPOS (Érd) and TAMÁS TÓTH (Budapest Zoo). Grateful thanks are due to all of them. I am deeply indebted to my son, ATTILA KORSÓS, for translating the text into English, and to Professor KRAIG ADLER (Cornell University, Ithaca, USA) for useful comments and linguistic corrections.