SOMMAIRE

The catalogue of caves with endemic cavernicolous arthropod fauna of Romania

The authors provide the centralized data about the Romanian caves with endemic fauna, based on all reliable bibliographic sources (as quoted in text and cited in the chapter references) and based on their research activity. The complete list of the Romanian caves with endemic cave-dwelling arthropod species identified up to the subspecies level is presented.

Size of the cave bear population and skeletal distribution from Urşilor Cave, Romania

Spatial distribution analyses of fossil bones are often used in cave taphonomy for i) assessing directly the size of a given fossil population and ii) indirectly, for palaeo-environmental reconstructions. Urşilor Cave from northwestern Romania hosts one of the richest MIS 3 cave bear bone assemblages of Europe, and as the nature of the bone deposition was not settled yet, the study of the size of cave bear population and the distribution of the skeletal element was needed

Identification key to the cavernicolous Diplopoda of Romania

The authors analyze the families Trachysphaeridae, Trichopolydesmidae and the tribe Typhloiulini and provide an identification key for the cavernicolous Diplopoda recorded from the caves of Romania

Collembola (Hexapoda) from Mehedinţi Mountains (SW Carpathians, Romania), with four new records for the Romanian fauna

The authors present the Collembola species collected from the Mehedinţi Mountains, SW Carpathians. Four species [Pachyotoma recta (Stach, 1930), Megalothorax incertus Börner, 1903, Pygmarrhopalites infrasecundarius (Loksa and Rubio, 1966) Vargovitsh, 2009 and Pygmarrhopalites longicornis (Cassagnau and Delamare Deboutteville, 1953) Vargovitsh, 2009] are reported as new for the Romanian fauna. Notes on the taxonomic status, morphology and distribution of the species are given

Morphological structures of the integument of Mesoniscus graniger

The integument surface of the cavernicolous terrestrial isopod Mesoniscus graniger collected in the Magura and Zidita caves, Romania, was investigated using the SEM. Almost the entire body surface is covered by honeycomb-like polygonal scales arranged like a net. Only two fields on both sides of the cephalon have a smoother structure with less pronounced and somewhat morphologically altered scale microstructures

GHEORGHE RACOVIŢĂ (September 18, 1940 – December 1, 2015)

He graduated the Gymnasium in the city of Braşov in 1951 and he followed the classes of “George Bariţiu” High School in Cluj from 1951 to 1957. Since his childhood he showed a special interest for plants and animals, and between 1957 and 1962 he became a student of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Geography of the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj