120 Years in 120 Objects

Join the KwaZulu-Natal Museum in celebrating the museum’s 120^th year of orbiting the sun. Staff and guest curators have chosen one object or item per year of our existence to highlight to the public. Visit the website and our social media platforms regularly to see the latest object and keep an eye out for information about a physical exhibition later this year!

Today’s Object is from 1916

Unique Cuttlefish Shells by Igor Muratov, Curator of Mollusca

The first curator of our molluscan collection, Henry Clifden Burnup (1852–1928) was mainly interested in land snails, but occasionally collected some shells of marine molluscs as well. He visited Tongaat Beach in 1909, and collected a number of shells on the shore there. Later he sent some of them for identification to Edgar Albert Smith (1847–1916), a British malacologist, who in 1916 described four new species of cuttlefish (Cephalopoda) based on that material: Sepia acuminata, S. confusa, S. incerta and S. insignis. These were the last species that were described by Smith, as he passed away a few months later. Most of those shells were returned to Burnup, and our collection has a number of syntypes* that are illustrated below.

* A syntype is one of the specimens on which an original description is based.

References

Muratov I.V. and Davis L. 2011. Primary types in the collection of molluscs in the KwaZulu-Natal Museum: Scaphopoda and Cephalopoda. African Invertebrates 52(2): 255–263. https://doi.org/10.5733/afin.052.0203

Smith E.A. 1916. On the shells of the South African species of the Sepiidae. Proceedings of the Malacological Society of London 12(1): 20–26.

The shells of three species of Sepia collected by Burnup in 1909 and described by Smith in 1916. Figs 5–8 (syntypes in KZNM collection): (5) Sepia confusa, 42.2×9.1 mm; (6) S. insignis, 18.4×5.8 mm; (7) S. incerta, 77.9×13.8 mm; (8) S. incerta, 35.1×9.8 mm (after Muratov and Davis 2011: 260, Figs 5–8).