Franz Thuma (1863-1923)

Exhibit of the Month 8 / 2018

In August 2018, we will not present any collection item as the Exhibit of the Month, but the personality of Franz Thuma.

Franz Thuma (1863-1923) was the only mineral dealer in the Most region at the beginning of the twentieth century. Until 1906, he worked as a mining official in the North Bohemian coal district. After that, he fully devoted himself to his passion, the geology of the Most area. He was particularly interested in the paleontology of the Cretaceous period, and several scientific articles on this topic are attributed to him. A large collection of minerals, rocks, and fossils formed the basis of the business he operated until the period of World War I. In the later years of his life, he became an official at the Most sugar factory. He was also a member of the Museum Society in Most and donated several samples of minerals, rocks, and fossils to the museum collections. Only a small part of his donations has survived in the collections to this day.

In the collections of the Regional Museum in Most, several collection items have been preserved, which still bear the original labels of the Franz Thuma business. These are samples from Bohemia - for example, a moldavite with a brief location "South Bohemia", cinvaldit with scheelite from Cínovec, wolframite from Cínovec. From European localities, samples of wulfenite from Bleiberg in Carinthia, Austria, boulangerite - a variety of plumbojarosite from the Baia Sprie locality in Transylvania, present-day Romania, and chlorite from the Saxon Ansprung in Germany have been preserved. In the paleontological collections, there are several collections of various shells of marine animals from the Cretaceous period. There is a high probability that these were donated or sold to the museum by Franz Thuma himself. Unfortunately, no documentation has survived to confirm this assumption.