Matskási István (szerk.): A Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum évkönyve 101. (Budapest 2009)
Pálfy, J.: Review of invertebrate and vertebrate paleontological types in the collection of the Hungarian Natural History Museum
Review ofpaleonotogical types in the HNHM 7 HISTORY OF THE COLLECTION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE TYPE CATALOGUE The eventful history of the paleontological collections of the HNHM from the earliest 19 t h century beginnings within the HNM through the late 20 t h century is summarized by KECSKEMÉTI & NAGY (1987). The collections of HNHM survived the World War II with relatively minor losses but during the Hungarian uprising in October 1956, a fire destroyed a major part of the collections and resulted in massive damage. Unfortunately this also led to the destruction of a large number of type specimens. The types believed to be permanently lost at this or other events are included in the type catalogue with the appropriate remark. After 1956, a new inventory of the surviving collections was started. Meanwhile the remaining part of the collections was supplemented by generous donations from other institutions and new acquisitions from a vigorous paleontological research program. Further type specimens were obtained in both ways. The first modern effort to build a catalogue of type specimens is the work of BODA (1964) that includes types described from Hungary in the paleontological literature up to I960, housed in either of the two main type repositories of the country, the HNHM and the Geological Institute of Hungary (GIH). No update of the catalogue of BODA (1964) was published in the following 40 years. Developing a card-catalogue of type specimens in the HNHM had been carried out for internal use by former staff member I. Z. NAGY but his project has not been completed. Our recent effort used that card catalogue as a starting point and supplemented it by data culled from the literature. For the first time, a digital catalogue of the paleontological types was compiled and made available to the scientific community through a searchable database on the worldwide web in 2004. Subsequently, the PG-HNHM collections were moved to temporary premises in 2005 and, shortly afterwards, to the newly renovated home of the department in 2006. Packing, moving, unpacking and rearranging of the entire collection necessitated a quick and rudimentary computerization of our holdings. During this process we discovered that the web-based type catalogue was far from complete and a significant number of type specimens were omitted. An additional problem arose regarding the different status of types. Numerous taxa, which lack formal holotype designation but have figured member(s) of their type series, were listed in BODA (1964) with holo- and paratypes, but these had to be reinterpreted as syntypes following the ICZN. Significant effort has been made to recognize original type series and many specimens have been added to the list as additional syntypes or paratypes, even if they were previously unlabelled as types but have to be regarded as such according to the ICZN. Prior to publication of the catalogue (PÁLFY et al. 2008) we took several steps towards completeness: 1 ) we gleaned further data from the primary paleontological literature; 2) we included all types discovered when handling every specimen during the move of our collections; 3) we reprocessed the catalogue of BODA (1964) in search of possible types existing in our collections but unknown at that time; 4) we culled the hand-written inventory books in search of possible hints for the type status of specimens; and 5) we critically reviewed the material donated after 1956 by the GIH and the Eötvös University of ,> Annls hist.-nat. Mus. natn. hung. 101, 2009
