[Taxacom] Fate of the Hungarian Natural History Museum

[Dan Lahr]

Dear all,

A while ago someone brought this issue up in Taxacom, and I recently
contacted a Hungarian colleague fo explanation about the very sad
situation.  It is unfortunate that such an important museum will face
this destiny, and even more frightening is the prospect that many
others may follow the same path given the current economic situation.
I am pasting here a text that was recently published in Nature about
the situation. Original is here:
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110607/full/474139a.html


"Hungarian natural history under threat

Historical collections given marching orders as government plans
military university at museum site.

Looking for a new home: 200 human mummies from the eighteenth century,
the remains of rare European dinosaurs and 10 million other artefacts
currently at the Hungarian Natural History Museum, which is facing
eviction later this year. The Hungarian government plans to turn the
historic Budapest building given to the museum after the fall of
communism in 1989 into a university to train the military or the
police.

Scientists in Hungary and abroad are shocked by the move because the
imposing 1836 Ludovika building has been extensively renovated for the
museum, and curators are still moving the collections in. They say
that the museum has not been offered an alternative site, and fear
that the collections will have to be stored in crates until a new home
is found.

"When the government announced the new university in February, they
described the Ludovika as a long-neglected building. That came as a
surprise to those of us who work there," says József Pálfy, a member
of a joint research team between the museum's palaeontology research
group and the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. But the government
justifies its decision by saying that parts of the building need
further renovations and that using the Ludovika for the new university
is in keeping with tradition — the building contained a military
academy until 1945.

The museum employs more than 70 scientists and publishes around 50
papers a year in international journals. In addition to the mummies —
which were found in a church crypt in Vac in central Hungary and used
to study the history of tuberculosis — it houses fossils found in
western Hungary from ceratopsian dinosaurs, which were previously
thought not to have lived in Europe.

The collections, some of which date back to 1802, had been scattered
around the city before the museum was granted the Ludovika buildings
in the early 1990s. The buildings were in disrepair, but the Hungarian
government invested around 10 billion forints (US$53 million) to
refurbish them. The buildings now give the museum 5,000 square metres
of exhibition space, as well as modern research laboratories and three
underground levels for storage.

András Jávor, state secretary for the Hungarian Ministry of National
Resources, which is responsible for the museum, says that no jobs or
resources will be lost in the reorganization, and that his ministry
"is consulting with the museum about its future location". But Attila
Ősi, a palaeontologist in the same research group as Pálfy, whose
discovery of the ceratopsian dinosaur fossils led to a Nature paper
last year (A. Ősi et al. Nature 465, 466–468; 2010), says that
research will suffer if they are forced to pack up their specimens
again.

About 100 inter­national researchers use the collections every year,
and those contacted by Nature echo the concerns of their Hungarian
colleagues. "The collections at the museum are unique, and moving them
again would create huge problems for multinational research
collaborations," says Gareth Dyke, a palaeontologist at University
College Dublin in Ireland, who is currently working at the museum.

Museum staff had just started to get comfortable at the Ludovika. "The
scientists here are still spending time checking inventories to make
sure all the objects have survived moving in," says Ősi. "After 200
years we got a central building for our museum," adds István Matskási,
its director-general, "and now we do not know where we will have to
go."


-- 
Daniel Lahr
-------------------------------------------------
PhD candidate
Organismic and Evolutionary Biology
U Massachusetts- Amherst
319 Morrill Science Center, Amherst
Amherst, MA 01003
413-585-3881