The ground beetles (Coleoptera, Carabidae) from the René Jeannel collection of the Babeș-Bolyai University Zoological Museum, Romania

Abstract

This paper reviews the ground beetles from René Jeannel collection which is preserved in Zoological Museum of Babeș-Bolyai University. The illustrious coleopterologist, René Jeannel was a French entomologist, who worked between 1920-1930 as Deputy Director of the Institute of Speleology founded by Emil Racovitza, the first institute of its kind in the world. He was also a professor of general biology at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Cluj Napoca. As well, in that period he published numerous articles on the systematics, phylogeny, biogeography and evolution of cave and endogenous beetles. In 1931, R. Jeannel left Romania to start working at the Muséum National d'histoire naturelle, whose director he was between 1945 -1951. During the 10 years of activity in Romania, he created and organized an important collection of ground beetles (Coleoptera, Carabidae). The total number of prepared and labeled specimens is 1672. The material was collected between 1921-1927, mostly in Transylvania, Romania. The collection includes 182 species from 56 genera and contains rare or endemic species. Among the endemic species we list: Pterostichus bielzii (Fuss, 1858), endemic to the Apuseni mountains, is present in the collection from 13 different locations; Nebria (Nebria) transsylvanica Germar, 1823, an endemic species in the Romanian Carpathians and in the southern part of the Carpathians in Ukraine; Platynus (Batenus) banaticus (I.Frivaldszky von Frivald, 1865) present in the collection from 3 locations. For the genus Carabus, representative species are Carabus (Megodontus) planicollis Küster, 1846, endemic species in Romania, and the Natura 2000 species Carabus variolosus Fabricius, 1787 and Carabus (Procerus) gigas (Creutzer, 1799). Among the Trechinae the most representative are the genus Duvalius, with four species: Duvalius cognatus subsp. longicollis Jeannel, 1928, D. laevigatus (Bokor, 1913), D. budae subsp. dioszeghyi Mallasz, 1928 and D. hegeduesii subsp. jonescoi (Jeannel, 1919), and the genus Trechus with 7 species, of which 3 are endemic in Romania: T. bannaticus Dejean, 1831, T. biharicus Meixner, 1912, and T. marginalis Schaum, 1862. The collection is a very valuable one, both from a historical and scientific point of view, because it offers an overview of the diversity and distribution of carabids in the karst areas of Romania, at the beginning of the 20th century.