120 Years in 120 Objects
Join the KwaZulu-Natal Museum in celebrating the museum’s 120th 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 1986
Dredging for Sea Snails by Igor Muratov, Curator of Mollusca
Almost half a century ago, the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), and the National Research Institute for Oceanology (NRIO) gave our scientists the opportunity to use the Research Vessel Meiring Naudé. A number of dredging expeditions on this 32-metre-long, 364 tonne vessel, resulted in the collection of many molluscs and, in turn, led to numerous new taxa being described. One of the first interesting molluscs in this dredging programme, was collected on the 2nd of March 1981 during one of the trial runs on R.V. Meiring Naudé prior to its first official Museum research expedition in August 1981.
This beautiful mollusc (see the photo) from the family Fissurellidae, turned out to be an unknown species, and five years later was described by our two curators, David (Dai) Herbert and Richard (Dick) Kilburn, as Emarginula viridicana Herbert & Kilburn, 1986. The illustrated holotype (the specimen that the description is based on) was dredged alive from a depth of 110 metres, from sponge rubble in the Indian Ocean, roughly 50 km south of Durban.
The holotype of E. viridicana (15.2×10.53×9.3 mm, scale bar: 10 mm). From figure 10 in our recent publication on the molluscan types (Muratov I.V. & Heyns-Veale E. 2020. Primary types in the collection of molluscs in the KwaZulu-Natal Museum: Patellogastropoda and Lepetellida. African Invertebrates 61(1): 49–81)
