Limnaeus compactus, " Ziegler "

Vinarski, Maxim V., 2016, Annotated type catalogue of lymnaeid snails (Mollusca, Gastropoda) in the collection of the Natural History Museum, Berlin, Zoosystematics and Evolution 92 (1), pp. 131-152 : 141

Taxon classification Animalia Hygrophila Lymnaeidae

compactus "Ziegler" Fig. 54

Limnaeus compactus “Ziegler” (? in MS).

Material.

Two shells collected in the Danube River in Austria are housed in ZMB under accession number 109748. The largest of two shells is 24.8 mm height.

Current taxonomic allocation.

An obvious synonym of Radix auricularia .

Remark.

The species has not been mentioned in the most inclusive handbooks on lymnaeid taxonomy ( Küster 1862; Clessin 1886; Hubendick 1951) as well as in special works devoted to the Central and Eastern Europe continental malacofauna, where other species attributed to Ziegler were listed ( Rossmässler 1835; Beck 1837; Kobelt 1877; Westerlund 1885; Clessin 1887-1890). I have to add that the very attribution of this species to Ziegler is conventional. As Welter-Schultes (2013) explains, Ziegler was not a scientist. He was a shell dealer in Vienna and "sent labelled shells with new names to researchers, who then described the new species and attributed the names to the dealers. At the end they had many hundreds of names. After 1905 the malacologists agreed that shell dealers should not be regarded as authors of names because they had in most cases not done any scientific work" ( Welter-Schultes 2013: 96).