Melanopsis affinis Pallary, 1916

Neubauer, Thomas A., 2016, A nomenclator of extant and fossil taxa of the Melanopsidae (Gastropoda, Cerithioidea), ZooKeys 602, pp. 1-358 : 30-31

† Melanopsis affinis Pallary, 1916 [invalid]

Original source.

Pallary 1916: 78.

Type horizon.

Late Villafranchian, early Pleistocene.

Type locality.

“D’Italie” ( Férussac 1823 had given the locality more precisely as "entre Otricoli et le Vigne, route de Rome à Foligno" []), Italy.

Remarks.

The name often appears as " Melanopsis affinis Férussac” in the literature (e.g., Wenz 1929: 2653; Esu and Girotti 1975: 251). It was first mentioned in Férussac (1814) as nomen nudum for a specimen from the Euphrates River. Later, Férussac (1823) listed the name in synonymy of Melanopsis nodosa Férussac, 1822. Unlike Pallary (1916) claimed and followed by Wenz (1929), affinis is not to be preferred over nodosa , because at that time affinis was not an available name - it has never been described, indicated or illustrated (as, for example, wrongly presumed by Esu and Girotti 1975) and so does not fulfill the requirements of availability (Art. 11 and 12; see also Art. 11.6). Pallary (1916) was the first to affiliate the name with an illustration, namely the one of Melanopsis nodosa provided by Férussac, 1823 (pl. 7, fig. 13), and made the name thereby available. The illustrated specimen is, however, the holotype (by monotypy) of Melanopsis nodosa Férussac, 1822 ( Férussac used the same plates in both of his works and thus Pallary actually referred to the specimen illustrated as Melanopsis nodosa in the "Histoire naturelle"; see also introduction and Table 1 for details of Férussac’s publications). Consequently, Melanopsis affinis Pallary, 1916 is a junior objective synonym of Melanopsis nodosa . Moreover, the name is a junior homonym of Melanopsis affinis Handmann, 1882.