The Varazdin Municipal Museum

The Herzer Palace
Franjevacki trg 6/I
tel.: 042/43-580, 213-491
fax: 042/51-519

The Entomological Department was opened in the scope of the Varazdin Municipal Museum in 1954. It is located at Herzer Palace in the centre of the town. The first collection was in a special way established by Franjo pl. Koscec (1882-1968), the local high-school teacher and entomologist. He donated his large natural scientific collections to the City of Varazdin in 1959. His work was, in the 1962-1980 period, continued by his daughter Ruzica Koscec, a biology professor.

With the intention of providing an authentic presentation of the insects' role in the living communities of our territory, a number of individual exhibits have been put on display since the original collection's arrangement, illustrating different species' biology, developmental cycles, as well as a number of underground nesting sites and other shelters , dug-outs and bite scars made by this universal animal species.

The collection also includes enlarged models of certain insect species made by Franjo and Ruzica Koscecin order to provide a detailed presentation of the way they are built, as well as of their living habits.

The Department's holdings consist of entomological collections, a herbarium, and Franjo Koscec's legacy. Over the years, the holdings have been expanded by entomological material from the territory of northwestern Croatia. Its scientifically valuable collections, including several tens of thousand specimens, bring testimony of natural properties and environmental changes, thus constituting an inevitable source of information for the elaboration of the Croatian fauna inventory.

The Herzer Palace is currently undergoing reconstruction, while preparations are under way for a new permanent collection.

Franjo Koscec's entomological collection is one among the most valuable collections of its kind in the country, at the same time constituting the majority of the Department's holdings. Some 50,000 specimens have been collected since 1903 until the very present day on the territory of wider Varazdin surroundings (northwestern Croatia). Collections are classified per insect genuses and families, for instance: Lepidoptera (particularly Rhopalocera, Noctudiae, Geometridae, Aegeridae, etc.), Coleoptera (Carabidae, Cerambycidae, Curcolionidae, and other smaller families, Odonata, Hymenoptera, Diptera, as well as collections of other smaller insect genuses.

Lepidoptera

The entomological collections of Franjo Koscec include nearly all families from the genus of butterflies (Lepidoptera) that are typical of the area.

Each identified species is accompanied by data regarding its discovery sites and dates. This particular collection of moths includes specimens collected in the 1930-1970 period in Varazdin surroundings (Hrvatsko Zagorje). Faunistically speaking, the most important discoveries concern two species that are otherwise quite rare on Croatian territory: Anarta myrtilli (Linnaeus, 1761) and Haplodrina superstes (Ochsenheimer, 1816). The zoogeographic analysis has shown that the collection is dominated by Eurasian species, which is conditioned by predominant environmental properties of the area, as well as by its location.

Official: Antica Bregovic, grad. eng. of biology, Curator