Treasure of the month January: Wallace snail from Indonesia

1 January 2018

Photo: Foto: UHH/CeNak, Ayu Nurinsiyah

The tiny snail has been named after Alfred Russel Wallace.

The treasure of the month January is a four millimeter small snail from Indonesia. It was selected to match the special exhibition "Vanishing legacies - the world as a forest" on display at the Museum of Nature - Zoology until March 2018.

The naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823 - 1913), whose excursions to South America and Southeast Asia play a central role in the exhibition, discovered the snail with the strangely slanted shell on the Indonesian island of Seram. The German malacologist Ludwig Pfeiffer recognized that it was an unknown species. He named the tiny animal after the famous collector. Today it bears the scientific name Callianella wallacei (Pfeiffer, 1862).

The Altona merchant Otto Semper received one of the specimens collected by Wallace from Ludwig Pfeiffer's collection and gave it to the Altona Museum. When, after the end of the war, the Altona Museum gave its zoological collection to the Zoological Museum, the piece collected by Wallace was among them. It is still in the scientific collection of the LIB today.

More Information:  www.cenak.uni-hamburg.de/sammlungen/zoologie/malakologie.html

View all "Treasures of the month":  www.cenak.uni-hamburg.de/aktuelles/schatz-des-monats.html