Helix egesta Gray, 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 : 42

Helix egesta Gray, 1850

Pl. 4, fig. F

Gray, 1850. Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London, 17 (1849): 166.

Type material: Syntypes (10), NHMUK 1849.12.3.75–78, NHMUK 1850.12.28.504–508 (combined lots, dry shell material) .

Label details: ‘ egesta Gray, N. Z’, ‘ New Zealand, Major Greenwood’.

Type locality: ‘Auckland’ (Gray, 1850: 166).

Previous illustrations of type material: A shell illustrated by Pfeiffer (1853 [in 1852–1860]: pl. 155, figs. 18–22) may or may not be a syntype; one illustrated by Reeve (1852 [in 1851–1854]: pl. 131, fig. 798) is from the Cuming collection, and there is no evidence to indicate that it was from the type series.

Remarks: The original description, which was reproduced by Gray (1851: 66), was based on material that was collected at Auckland in the mid to late 1840s by Dr. Andrew Sinclair and Major Joseph Greenwood, and sent to the British Museum. Helix egesta Gray, 1850 is the type species of Egestula Iredale, 1915 , by original designation. Climo (1989: 616) suggested, on the basis of shell characters, that Egestula belonged in the Helicodiscidae , and the genus was listed in that family by Spencer & Willan (1995: 41), Marshall (1996: 41), and Spencer et al. (2009: 216). However, Schileyko (2001: 984) noted that shell characters and anatomy were more typical of the Charopidae .

Current Taxonomy: Listed as Egestula egesta (Gray, 1850) by Iredale (1915: 482), Powell (1937: 89), Spencer & Willan (1995: 41) and Spencer et al. (2009: 215).

Distribution: New Zealand; northern North Island—Auckland and southern Northland, including Taranga Island ( Milligan 1954; Powell 1979).