Treasure of the month

January 2018

Wallace snail from Indonesia

The treasure of the month January is a four millimeter small snail from Indonesia. It was chosen to match the special exhibition "Vanishing Legacies - the World as Forest" on display at the Museum of Nature - Zoology until March 2018. 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 Museum of Nature - Zoology, the piece collected by Wallace was among them. It is still in the scientific collection of the LIB today.

Photo: UHH/CeNak, Ayu Nurinsiyah