o_19ko2dt161ng2j4e1tgnoqv1s45a.pdf

INDRANEIL DAS & NORSHAM YAAKOB (2007)
to the public in 1888, Wray holding charge as Curator. The main museum building was
completed in 1907, and in 1940, the Perak Museum and Selangor Museum were amalgamated
to form the Federated Malay States Museum. Herpetological (and other zoological) surveys
were carried out by the Selangor Museum throughout the Malay Peninsula, and reported in
the Journal of the Museum. Following the government’s programme of decentralisation in the
1930s, the two museums were again separated, and became state institutions. Museum staff
continued to publish in the Federated Malay States Museums Journal, which issued 19 volumes
between 1905 and 1939 (terminating with World War II). A misdirected load of bombs from
an American B29 bomber landed on Selangor Museum on 10 March 1945. The collections
were destroyed, and parts of the salvaged material were eventually transferred to the Perak
Museum, Taiping in January 1946. In May 1949, the office of the Director of Museums moved
from Kuala Lumpur to Taiping.
The most important collection of regional herpetological (and indeed, zoological) materials
lies in the Raffles Museum of Biodiversity Research, National University of Singapore. The
Museum’s earliest collection originates from the 1840s, and contains much valuable material
acquired by a succession of field-oriented curators, some of whom also acquired specimens
through exchange programmes with other museums. In 1888, field collectors were hired and
collections took place mainly from the region of the border between Selangor and Pahang.
The following year, collectors were sent to Johor and Jelebu in Negeri Sembilan.
Compared to Borneo, there were fewer foreign expeditions in the Malay Peninsula in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. In 1899–1900, English biologists, together with students
from the universities of Cambridge and Oxford conducted the Skeat Expedition, organised by
Walter William Skeat (1866–1953), British ethnographer and member of the Malayan Civil
Service (Skeat 1900). Its objective was to collect data on ethnology, zoology, botany and
geology of the Pattani States of Siam (now Thailand), adjacent portions of northern Malaysian
states, including Terengganu and Kelantan (sites listed in Skeat 1901), then under Siamese
sovereign. The acquired herpetological materials were studied by Frank Fortescue Laidlaw
(1876–1963) (Laidlaw 1900, 1901a, 1901b), a student of Trinity College, Cambridge, who
was to later become an authority of the Odonata.
A second collection from the northern Malay Peninsula was made by Thomas Nelson Annandale
(1876–1924), a student of Balliol College, Oxford, who was to later join the Indian Museum,
and Herbert Christopher Robinson (1874–1929), who was appointed Curator of the Selangor
Museum, between 1901 and 1902. Boulenger (1903) provided an extended account of the
fauna in a special volume edited by Annandale and Robinson. In the species accounts were
extensive ecological notes made by Annandale. New herpetological taxa described were named
for the leaders of the expedition, include the rare rhacophorid, Rhacophorus robinsonii, for
Robinson and Cyclemys annandalii (presently Heosemys annandalii), for Annandale.
An important collector was Count Nils Gyldenstolpe (1886–1961), ‘Lord of the Bedchamber’
to King Gustav V of Sweden, who was primarily interested in ornithological taxonomy (see
Curry-Lindahl 1961), but also made significant herpetological collections in Thailand (1911–
1912) and the Malay Peninsula (1914–1915). His material were described by Einar Lönnberg
(1865–1942), professor in charge of vertebrates at Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet, Stockholm,
Sweden (Lonnberg 1916), his assistant, Lars Gabriel Andersson (1868-1951) Swedish zoologist
and for a while, a member of staff of the Museum (Andersson 1916), and by Gyldenstolpe
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