Helix fatua Pfeiffer, 1857

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 : 43

Helix fatua Pfeiffer, 1857

Pl. 3, fig. B

Pfeiffer, 1857. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 25:107.

Type material: Syntypes (2), NHMUK 1974128 (dry shell material); ex Museum Cuming (Acc. no. 1829) .

Label details: ‘ Helix fatua Pfr , New Zealand’—in Pfeiffer’s handwriting.

Type locality: ‘New Zealand’ ( Pfeiffer 1857b: 107); incorrectly listed as ‘Taupiri’ by Powell (1979: 330).

Remarks: There has been confusion over the identity of this species. A reference to Helix fatua by Hutton (1883a: 137) was based on misidentification of a species that he subsequently described as Phrixgnathus celia Hutton, 1883 (see Hutton 1884a: 176 for synonymy). Hutton (1884b: 197) and most subsequent authors have assigned Pfeiffer’s species to Laoma Gray, 1850 or Phrixgnathus Hutton, 1883 (Punctidae) , but our re-examination of the type material at NHMUK indicates that it belongs in the genus Therasiella Powell, 1948 (Charopidae) . The two specimens of Helix fatua in the type material fall within the range of variation attributed to Therasiella celinde (Gray, 1850) by Cumber (1967c) and subsequent workers, and the two taxa are here considered conspecific. Helix fatua Pfeiffer, 1857 was listed as occurring at ‘Taupiri Novae Seelandiae (Hochstetter)’ by Pfeiffer (1868a: 80) and subsequent authors (e.g., Hector 1873: 7; Hutton 1880: 19, 1884b: 197; Pfeiffer & Clessin 1881: 74; Suter 1913b: 751; Powell 1979: 330), but the whereabouts of Hochstetter’s specimen(s) is not known. They cannot have been from the type series because Hochstetter did not visit New Zealand until 1858–1859, after this species was described. A syntype of Helix fatua Pfeiffer is illustrated here for the first time in pl. 3, fig. B.

Taxonomy: Treated here as a subjective junior synonym of Therasiella celinde (Gray, 1850) N. syn.