Josef Prokop Pražák

Josef Prokop Pražák (22 June 1870 - 15 July 1904) was a Bohemian ornithologist. Born in Hořiněves he spent much of his life in Bohemia but also lived in Vienna, Edinburgh and for some time in Ukraine serving in the army. He published numerous works in ornithology but a lot of his work has subsequently come to be recognized as fraudulent. He described many fake species of bird including Vanellus grisescens which he claimed was collected by Richard Materna in northern Chile and Trochalopteron hennickei supposedly collected by Jaworowski from the Hunan Province of China. He also contributed a paper on bird migration with arrival dates for species in eastern Bohemia. His data covered more than a hundred years and this was submitted to the Hungarian journal Aquila but was suspected to be fraudulent and not published. Like Richard Meinertzhagen he too stole specimens from museums and resubmitted them with altered labels. Ernst Bauernfeind, a curator at the Natural History Museum at Vienna (Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, NHMW) found that a Bohemian specimen of Prunella montanella (NHMW 11423) that Pražák submitted matched details to a specimen collected by Dybowski at Kultuk, Lake Baikal, which had gone missing.^[1][2]

References