Treasure of the month

October 2016

Agate snail

The treasure of the month October is the holotype of the agate snail Archachatina degneri, the individual after which this species was described. This animal was collected during the Second German Central Africa Expedition in 1910, financed by the Hamburg Scientific Foundation. It was supposedly 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 borrowed 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 wartime losses, the malacological collection of the LIB is today again the fourth largest collection of molluscs (mainly snails, bivalves and squids) in Germany, with about 150,000 series.