Melanopsis nodosa Ferussac , 1822

Neubauer, Thomas A., 2016, A nomenclator of extant and fossil taxa of the Melanopsidae (Gastropoda, Cerithioidea), ZooKeys 602, pp. 1-358 : 194

† Melanopsis nodosa Ferussac, 1822

Original source.

Férussac 1819-1851: Mélanopsides fossiles, pl. 1 (1822), fig. 13.

Type horizon.

Late Villafranchian, early Pleistocene.

Type locality.

"Entre Otricoli et le Vigne, route de Rome à Foligno" [between Otricoli and Le Vigne, at the road from Rome to Foligno], Italy.

Remarks.

The name first appeared in 1822 on the captions for plate 1 of the “Mélanopsides fossiles" in Férussac’s "Histoire naturelle" (see also introduction for details). While Férussac (1823) included also recent specimens under that name in his monograph on the Melanopsidae , the only specimen illustrated in 1822 in the "Histoire naturelle" was a fossil one from the Villafranchian of Italy. This fact remained widely unknown to biologists and paleontologists alike. The consequence, however, is that probably none of the specimens referred to as Melanopsis nodosa in the biological literature (e.g., Pallary 1939, Glaubrecht 1993, 1996) or the IUCN Red List ( Van Damme 2014), which reports it from Anatolia and the Middle East, actually correspond to the real Melanopsis nodosa .

Fossil Italian specimens are often erroneously referred to as " Melanopsis affinis Férussac” or " Melanopsis antiqua Fèrussac” ( Pallary 1916, Wenz 1929, Esu and Girotti 1975), both of which are unavailable names.