Helix gunnii Pfeiffer, 1850

Brook, Fred J. & Ablett, Jonathan D., 2019, Type material of land snails (Mollusca: Gastropoda) described from New Zealand by taxonomists in Europe and North America between 1830 and 1934, and the history of research on the New Zealand land snail fauna from 1824 to 1917, Zootaxa 4697 (1), pp. 1-117 : 79

Helix gunnii Pfeiffer, 1850

Pfeiffer, 1850. Zeitschrift für Malakozoologie, 6: 86.

Type material: This species was described from one or more specimens in the Cuming collection (Pfeiffer 1850: 86); type material not found in NHMUK collections in 2018, and whereabouts unknown .

Type locality: ‘wahrscheinlich ist sie aus Neuseeland, was leider nicht bestimmt angegeben ist’ (Pfeiffer 1850: 86) .

Previous illustrations of type material: The shell of ‘ H. greenwoodi ’ from the Cuming collection that was illustrated by Reeve (1852 [in 1851–1854]: pl. 81, fig. 434) and Tryon (1885 [after Reeve 1852]: pl. 24, fig. 74) may have been from the type series of gunnii Pfeiffer.

Remarks: Authorship attributed to Gray by Pfeiffer (1850: 86), but the latter was the first published description of this species (see Petit 2012: 92). The heft of Zeitschrift für Malakozoologie containing Pfeiffer’s description was issued in August 1850, according to a footnote on p. 96 of Volume 6, and hence was pre-empted by H. greenwoodi Gray, 1850 .

Current Taxonomy: A subjective junior synonym of Helix greenwoodii Gray, 1850 , according to Pfeiffer (1853: 156), Martens (1873: 8), Hedley & Suter (1893: 630), Suter (1894d: 284), Möllendorff & Kobelt (1903 [in 1903–1905]: 26) and Suter (1913b: 774).