Treasure of the month October: African agate snail

1 October 2016

In the collections of LIB valuable natural treasures are stored, which are presented exemplarily under the heading "Treasure of the Month". For October, the choice fell on an African agate snail, Archachatina degneri, whose holotype ...

The LIB collections house valuable natural treasures, which are presented as examples under the heading "Treasure of the Month". For October, the choice fell on an African agate snail, Archachatina degneri, whose holotype (the individual after which this species was described) is part of the Zoological Collection. This animal was collected during the Second German Central Africa Expedition in 1910, funded by the Hamburg Scientific Foundation. Supposedly it was found in the Congo. However, since the species only occurs in West Africa, the specimen must have been collected there at the beginning of the expedition. In 1935 it was loaned by the American agate snail specialists Bequaert & Clench, who described the new species and named it after the curator of the Hamburg collection, Eduard Degner. While the snail collection of the Hamburg Museum of Natural History was destroyed during its bombing in 1943, this valuable specimen was preserved in the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University and was returned to the Hamburg Zoological Museum in 1949.

Despite the war losses, the malacological collection of the LIB is today again the fourth largest collection of molluscs (mainly snails, bivalves and octopuses) in Germany with about 150,000 series.