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
14 J. P tîlfy DISTRIBUTION OF TYPES BY GEOGRAPHIC LOCALITIES AND LITHOSTRATIGRAPHIC UNITS Not surprisingly for a national natural history museum, almost four-fifths of the taxa are from type localities in Hungary. A significant number of types originate from neighboring countries, mostly from territories which at the time of description of taxa formed part of historic Hungary or the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy: Transylvanian part of Rumania, Slovakia, Croatia, Austria and Serbia (Fig. 6). That the number of taxa described from Turkey surpasses all other foreign countries is due to the recent acquisition of types from an exceptionally rich Triassic radiolarian fauna, published by KOZUR, OZSVÁRT and colleagues. The large number of types from Algeria and France are part of the Coquand Collection. The only other country, which provided a significant number of types, is China, but unfortunately these specimens originating from the late 19 t h century expedition of Count B. SZÉCHENYI appear to be lost. Ten additional countries furnished types in our collection, albeit each is represented by not more than five taxa. We attempted to allocate type strata into modern lithostratigraphic units. A total of 70 formations were identified as the provenance of 935 taxa, whereas no unambiguous lithostratigraphic assignment was possible for the remaining 246 taxa. There are 15 formations, which yielded 10 or more taxa with types in the HNHM collection (Fig. 7). Here again the "monograph effect" dominates the observed distribution, pulling the Oligocene Kiscell Clay Formation to the top of the list, followed by the Miocene "Leithakalk" equivalents (Sámsonháza and Rákos Formations) and the late Oligocene Eger Formation. RE VISIONARY TAXONOMIC WORK: RESULTS AND FURTHER OPPORTUNITIES Taxonomy is a scientific discipline, where advances are often made through revision of previously established taxa. During the compilation ot the type catalogue such revisions were noted in every case where we became aware of them. An effort was made to search for and consider published revisions. However, the expertise of the catalogue's authors falls short of covering all ages and taxonomic groups represented in the type collection, hence it is almost certain that we overlooked some existing revisions. With this caveat, revised names are now assigned to 170 taxa, or nearly 15% of the total. More than half of these revisions, involving 90 taxa, are purely nomenclatural in nature, i.e. restricted to changing the generic assignment of species-group taxa through recombination of names. We found 61 cases where the validity of taxa was questioned by the revisers who treated them as subjective junior synonyms of other species. For 17 subspecies there are published opinions, which reject the basis to erect and maintain subspecies, and for 15 of these cases, a new generic assignment is also suggested. Annls hist.-nat. Mus. natn. hung. 101, 2009
