Historical development of biospeleology in Romania after the death of Emile Racovitza

This is a modest contribution to the history of science, respectively the history of the Romanian biospeleology. Biospeleology, the science created by Emile Racovitza in 1907, knew, after the death of the scientist a second period of great development.This is the thriving period which began 5o years ago, in 1956, with the reorganization of the Institute of Speleology up to 2005, including the retirement of the last biospeleologists belonging to that generation – all more or less distinguished researchers, known as such outside Romania.The author, an eyewitness of these times, shows how, nine years after the death of Emile Racovitza, the Institute of Speleology – the first in the world – founded by the great biologist in 1920 within the framework of the Faculty of Science of the new ClujUniversity, was reorganized as an Institute of Speleology at a national level in two centers: a main one in Bucharest and a branch in Cluj. In the following we present the main achievements of the biospeleological teams from Bucharest and Cluj in the period between 1956 and 2005. In the end, we shortly analyse the development perspectives of the Romanian Biospeleology in the future.