Non-marine Molluscs

Our collection of land molluscs is one of the most important in Africa and is certainly the largest collection of southern African snails and slugs in the world. Henry Burnup was particularly interested in land snails and the specimens he collected in the early 1900's constitute an extremely important reference resource, including many type specimens. Additional material was added during Dolf van Bruggen's short tenure in the department during the early 1960's, but apart from this the collection grew little during the later 1900's. Since the mid 1990's, however, renewed interest terrestrial molluscs has seen the collection grow substantially, and we have added a large amount of material with good locality data to the collection.

Our holdings of freshwater molluscs, though not particularly extensive, are none the less important as reference material and as a historical record of species distributions.

Chlamydephorus burnupi (Click to enlarge)

The mollusc collection consists predominantly of dry shells, but wherever possible we also keep examples of each species, preserved in ethanol for anatomical and molecular study. The land and freshwater mollusc collections are now fully databased and the process of entering all the data for the marine collection is well underway.