Recognising type specimens in a dispersed collection. The Macaronesian land Mollusca described by R. T. Lowe

Abstract

A catalogue of the dispersed collection of the land snails of the Macaronesian Islands described by and attributed to R. T. Lowe is presented. The provenance of the material which relates primarily to T. V. Wollaston, his wife Edith Shepherd, Col. L. Worthington-Wilmer and H. B. Preston is discussed. Parts of the dispersed collection have been located in fifteen institutions in the United Kingdom, Ireland, The Netherlands, Germany, Belgium, Israel and the United States of America. The list (Appendix 1) comprises 216 nominal taxa attributable to Lowe of which 9 are infra-subspecific, introduced as subvarieties. In addition 8 manuscript names have been included. Possible type material of all but 21 have been located, these comprising 17 varieties and 4 subvarieties. A total of 9537 specimens have been located. The verification of the type status is discussed and a ranking of the type resources is attempted. Evidence is lacking to either corroborate or dismiss the syntype status of the majority of the material but past nomenclatural acts have selected lectotypes from many parts. Furthermore many museums consider the co-types distributed by H. B. Preston to be of syntype status. Only the shells stated to be figured in the 1831 and 1860 papers can be considered as figured syntypes, and these are figured in Appendix 2.