Collections of amphibians and reptiles by M.D. Ruzsky in Zoological Museum and Herbarium named after E.A. Eversman
Authors:   Kazan (Volga region) Federal University, Khairutdinov Ildar Z. , Garanin Valerian I. ,   Kazan (Volga region) Federal University, Belyaev Alexander N. ,   Kazan (Volga region) Federal University
Published: October 2024

Zoological Museum and Herbarium named after E.A. Eversman is one of the oldest museums of Kazan Federal University, whose history began at the end of the 18th century. The formation of the Museum is inextricably linked with the names of many prominent Russian scientists. A significant place among them belongs to Mikhail Dmitrievich Ruzsky (1864-1948), whose life was connected with Kazan and Kazan University for more than a quarter of a century - from 1884 to 1913. Zoological collections of M.D. Ruzsky are a reflection of his scientific interests and research, and are of historical and scientific value. There was a great role of M.D. Ruzsky as a collector and employee of the Zoological Museum of Kazan University, who made significant efforts in its development. Thus, for example, M.D. Ruzsky transferred 38 species of fish and 19 species of mammals to the museum. The collection of birds by M.D. Ruzsky, gathered in the period from 1887 to 1896, includes 439 samples. The articles and monographs of M.D. Ruzsky, the museum samples he collected, dating back more than a century, not only preserve the scientist’s memory, but also have not lost their relevance and significance even today. In this work, we wanted to analyze the collections of amphibians and reptiles collected by M.D. Ruzsky in the “Kazan period” of his life, and stored in the collections of Zoological Museum and Herbarium named after E.A. Eversman. The connection of M.D. Ruzsky with the Zoological Museum, at that time represented in the form of the Zoological Cabinet, and his role in replenishing the museum’s collections can be clearly seen especially in the first decade of his stay in Kazan. In 1884, M.D. Ruzsky became a student of the Department of Natural Sciences of the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Kazan Imperial University. We would like to note that the initial stage of M.D. Ruzsky’s formation as a zoologist is characterized by an extremely wide range of interests, which was manifested in the study of all available groups of animals - insects, fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds - and their collection. It is important that private collecting contributed greatly to the formation and growth of many Kazan museums, including the ones of Imperial University. After graduating from the university (1888), Mikhail Dmitrievich began performing the duties of a laboratory assistant at the Zoological Museum, and in 1889 he became a curator, working in this position until 1902. His research on the study of amphibians and reptiles of the Kazan province and neighboring territories dates back to the same period of time - 11 counties of the Kazan province, 5 counties in Simbirsk, and separate parts of the counties of Nizhny Novgorod, Vyatka, and Samara provinces. Probably, the materials collected during these studies formed the basis of M.D. Ruzsky’s collection of amphibians and reptiles, now presented in the collections of Zoological Museum of our university (See Tables 1, 2). It was in the period from 1884 to 1894 that the museum’s collection was most significantly replenished by Ruzsky, including through collections of amphibians and reptiles, of which 46 storage units were accumulated during this time. A significant part of the collection of amphibians and reptiles collected by M.D. Ruzsky (about 40 storage units) refers primarily to the vast territory of the Kazan province, especially to the Kazan district, which is explained by the accessibility of this territory for study. In addition to the Kazan province, Ruzsky’s collections include findings from the territory of the former Simbirsk province (See Tables 1-3). Subsequently, M.D. Ruzsky's range of interests in terms of zoology became more defined. It is known that in 1892 M.D. Ruzsky began to study the ants of the Kazan and Simbirsk provinces. In 1894, in collaboration with A.Ya. Gordyagin (future famous botanist and founder of Kazan Geobotanical School), Ruzsky published his first work devoted to the study of the ant fauna of eastern Russia, which largely determined his entire subsequent scientific career. As a result, his attention to other groups of animals and the number of their collections was noticeably reduced. However, we would like to note that from a geographical point of view, the herpe-tological collections of Mikhail Dmitrievich Ruzsky are becoming more interesting. For instance, in 1894, Ruzsky made a zoological excursion to the steppes of the Samara and Orenburg provinces, and to the Southern Urals within the Troitsk, Chelyabinsk, and Zlatoust districts. Later in 1896, M. D. Ruzsky visited the Tobolsk and Akmola contribution to science and education provinces; in 1897, Mikhail Dmitrievich visited the territories of what is now Kazakhstan, traveling through the Ural region and visiting the Inder Mountains (on the border of the modern Atyrau and West Kazakhstan regions of Kazakhstan), the mouth of the Urals, and further to Guryev, collecting samples of the local fauna (See Tables 1-3). In 1899 and 1900 Ruzsky made two large trips to the Caucasus, visiting Dagestan, the Terek region, Western and Eastern Transcaucasia, crossed the Main Caucasus ridge twice, delivering a collection of local animal species to the museum, including amphibians and reptiles (See Tables 2-3). Unfortunately, not everything that Mikhail Dmitrievich collected during his expeditions and transferred for storage to Zoological Cabinet has been preserved to this day. A number of preparations of amphibians and reptiles were excluded from the collection, as evidenced by the entries in the Documentary Catalog of Zoological Cabinet (See Table 3). The article contains 1 Figures, 3 Tables, 15 References. The authors express their gratitude to the senior researcher at the Laboratory of Herpetology of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Igor Vladimirovich Doronin, for consultations when working with the collections. The Authors declare no conflict of interest.