Matskási István (szerk.): A Magyar Természettudományi Múzeum évkönyve 94. (Budapest 2002)

Matskási, I.: Bicentenary of the Hungarian Natural History Museum

Right before World War II the insect collection alone contained nearly three million specimens. Luckily, the war itself caused negligible damage to the zoological building and collections. However, all the more tragic were the consequences of the two fires the events of the 1956 revolution ignited, which devastated both the world-famous Africa exhibition of the National Museum, and the entire mollusc, fish, amphibian, bird materials, the better part of mammals; nor did it spare the fly collection, one of the top-ranking ones in its kind. For the compensation of incalculable damages donations flowed from all over the world, and very intense collecting work ensued. Beginning from the sixties the staff of the Department of Zoology had the opportunity of joining exotic collecting tours more and more often, and the 1970s marked the start of fauna exploration in Hungarian national parks. Currently, the collection comprises more than 8 million specimens in all, mainly invertebrates in that number, 62,000 vertebrates, 30,000 microscopic slides, and approximately 170,000 vials of alcoholic material. The type specimens of about 85,000 species are kept in the Department of Zoology. However, it is not only the zoological material with a huge amount of data supporting it that lends value to the collection, but also the rate at which this material is processed, and the rate of data accessibility. The Department of Zoology is split into collections preserving the material of bigger or smaller animal groups. Generally, the structure of collections corresponds to the animal world's structure but, in certain cases, there may be substantial discrepancies as well. For understandable reasons, we do not really have a remarkable marine animal collection, which can also be said about the specimens of certain other regions that are also underrepresented. Collections can be assigned to three major groups: three collections focus on the five classes of vertebrates (mammals, birds, fish-amphibians-reptiles), six ones on insects (Diptera, Lepidoptera, Hymenoptera, Coleoptera, Hemiptera, and smaller insect orders), and another five collections include other invertebrates (crustaceans and other aquatic invertebrates, Arachnoidea and other arthropods, molluscs, helminths and other invertebrates, and the parasitological collection). Thus we have 14 zoological collections altogether, of which the coleopteran collection is the biggest, counting 3 million specimens, and deservedly world-famous. Alongside with the beetle collection, the collections of Diptera (or flies), Lepidoptera, and Hymenoptera (bees, ants, wasps) also stand out with nearly or more than one million specimens each. As regards type specimens - whose importance has already been pointed out - the collection of Arachnida is of extremely high value, as is the case especially with the tiny, soil-dwelling acarids with 4,000 type specimens. Including the specimens of 1,200 mammalian species, ours accounts for one of the ten biggest and richest European collections of mammals. Owing to the collection-orientated nature of the