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Hungarian Natural History Under Threat
from Nature News
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.
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