Making Known and Available: The importance of digitization of a historical malacological collection in the Science Museum of the University of Coimbra

Abstract

The Science Museum of the University of Coimbra (MCUC) manages the oldest zoological collections in Portugal. The molluscs are among the most relevant invertebrates within this collection, with over one hundred thousand specimens. A significant part of the Portuguese malacological collection in MCUC comes from the Madeira Archipelago, a group of oceanic islands with a high diversity of terrestrial molluscs and a hotspot of endemic taxa. A recent review of land snails from Madeira hosted at the MCUC revealed that there were around 130 lots and 2,000 specimens offered by naturalists since the 19 Century and none of them had been previously digitized. A significant number of these specimens was offered by António da Costa de Paiva (Barão de Castelo de Paiva) who described ten land snail species from the Madeira Archipelago in 1866 and published an extensive monograph on non-marine molluscs in 1867. The main goal of our work was to carry out the inventory of the mollusc collections from the Madeira Archipelago in the database of MCUC, and to discuss the importance of ‡ ‡,§ ‡