Mollusca

Pimenta, Alexandre Dias, Monteiro, Júlio César, Barbosa, André Favaretto, Salgado, Norma Campos & Coelho, Arnaldo Campos Dos Santos, 2014, Catalogue of the type specimens deposited in the Mollusca Collection of the Museu Nacional / UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Zootaxa 3780 (1), pp. 51-107 : 51-52

The Mollusca Collection of the Museu Nacional

The Mollusca Collection of the Museu Nacional (acronym MNRJ), one of the most important of its kind in South America, holds more than 32,000 registered lots and about 10,000 unregistered lots, which are currently being processed, including dry shells and preserved specimens from Brazilian and foreign provenance. The type material stems from studies carried out since the end of the 19th century by Brazilian and foreign researchers.

The early beginnings of this collection are difficult to establish. The earliest reference was by Netto (1870), who mentioned that molluscs were exhibited in the first building of the Museu Nacional; followed by Lacerda (1905), who stated that these specimens were exhibited at the present location of the museum. Miranda-Ribeiro (1924) referred to the mollusc collection, which at that time contained 584 Brazilian species, as determined by E. von Martens from “Zoologisches Museum”, presently “Museum für Naturkunde”, in Berlin.

In the 1910s and 1920s, the naturalist Bourgny de Mendonça curated the collection. In the early 1930s, Paulo de Miranda-Ribeiro established the first catalogue, with about 6,230 records of molluscan specimens included in the Zoological Collection of the Museu Nacional. This catalogue used the old numbering system of the Mollusca Collection, which ranged from 30,001 to 36,302. In 1942, the naturalist Emmanoel de Azevedo Martins, from “Divisão de Geologia e Minearologia” was responsible for managing the Mollusca Collection, initiating a new numbering system, which has consistently been followed until since. From 1950 on, the curators were, successively, Fausto Luiz de Souza Cunha and Arnaldo Campos dos Santos Coelho, with the important collaboration of Dr. Hugo de Souza Lopes. Arnaldo Campos dos Santos Coelho took part in the restructuring of the physical space for the collection and continued to develop it until his retirement in 1996, when the collection was transferred to the responsibility of Norma Campos Salgado. She retired in 2008, transferring the collection to its present curator, Alexandre Dias Pimenta.

In 1970, Hugo de Souza Lopes, a dipterologist from the Instituto Oswaldo Cruz in Rio de Janeiro (IOC), donated his entire private collection of molluscs, which was stored in IOC, to the MNRJ molluscan collection. This collection, containing more than 7,500 lots, had been catalogued by Hugo de Souza Lopes using his own numbering system, and since much of that material had been listed in various publications (sometimes with IOC acronym), the lots were entered into the MNRJ molluscan collection catalogue with their original collection numbers, with the added acronym HSL. In addition to being a renowned entomologist, Hugo de Souza Lopes was an enthusiast of molluscan taxonomy, which led him to establish contact with many malacologists throughout the world, resulting in an extensive exchange of material. For this reason, the MNRJ molluscan collection includes a large number of specimens, including some types that were originally listed as belonging to other collections.

Exchange of paratypes was a common practice in the 1970s, mainly with other Brazilian collections, including the present Museu Oceanográfico do Rio Grande, Rio Grande do Sul state (MORG) and the Museu de Zoologia, São Paulo state (MZSP), and also with institutions in other countries, such as the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales "Bernardino Rivadavia" in Buenos Aires, Argentina (MACN) and the Museo Nacional de Historia Natural y Antropología, in Montevideo, Uruguay (MNHNM).

A particular case regarding donation of type material to MNRJ molluscan collection involves some taxa described by Wolfgang Weyrauch in a series of papers describing the terrestrial gastropods from Peru ( Weyrauch, 1957, 1960a, b, 1967a, b). Weyrauch deposited several paratypes in his private collection and often sent duplicate material to museums and private collectors throughout the world ( Barbosa et al., 2008).