Franz Malec

Franz Malec (born September 9, 1939 in Dresden ) is a German zoologist and paleontologist. From 1984 to 2005 he was director of the Natural History Museum in the Ottoneum in Kassel.

Life

In 1960 Malec graduated from high school in Bad Homburg . He then studied geology and zoology in Frankfurt. Together with his fellow student Gerhard Storch , he described two new small mammals from Macedonia in 1963 , Apodemus kahmanni (now a synonym for Apodemus agrarius ) and Pitymys felteni (today's name: Microtus felteni ). Malec and Storch dedicated the latter type to their mentor Heinz Felten . In the period that followed, Malec led numerous collection and excavation excursions in Europe, Turkey and Iran. In 1970 he published a thesis on his mapping to the geology of the central South Pyrenees . Malec was founded in 1974 under the direction of Heinz Tobien with the dissertation The small mammals of the Magdalenian discovery site Gönnersdorf (Neuwied basin / Rhine, Germany): their biotope and their origin. PhD at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz . From 1975 he worked as a sales representative for the pharmaceutical industry until he became curator of the zoological collection of the Natural History Museum in the Ottoneum in Kassel in 1977 . In 1982 he became provisional director and in 1984 he took over the position of director of the natural history museum from Gerhard Follmann , which he held until January 31, 2005. His successor was Kai Füldner. During Malec's tenure, the renovation of the museum building took place between 1994 and 1996, as well as the implementation of a new exhibition concept that relates to the history of the collection of the Landgraves of Hesse-Kassel and the region. Malec also dealt with paleontology, in particular with the Pleistocene small mammal fauna. Together with Gerhard Storch, he wrote the essay On the Knowledge of the Young Pleistocene Vole Pitymys melitensis (Mammallia, Rodentia) , which was published in 1970 in the Zeitschrift für Mammalkunde . 1972 appeared in the same journal the article Review and subfossil small mammals from the Vilayet Elazig, Eastern Anatolia. , which was created in collaboration with Storch and Dieter Kock . In 1977 the Mainz Geoscientific Mitteilungen published the article, which was co-authored with Heinz Tobien, the column fillings of the older Pleistocene from Neuleiningen near Grünstadt (Palatinate) (preliminary communication) . Since his retirement, Malec has dedicated himself to the entomofauna (especially the hover flies and wasps ) and the small mammals in Hesse and Rhineland-Palatinate. Parts of Malec's hymenoptera and small mammal collection are kept in the Natural History Museum in Mainz. His hoverflies collection is the largest single collection in the Mainz Natural History Museum put together by a single person.

Web links

• Employee profile at the Natural History Museum in the Ottoneum Kassel with bibliography
• Small but mighty! Mice and shrews in the national park (short biography about Franz Malec)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Natural History Museum in Mainz: Diptera collections