Saturday 19th January 2019: INDOOR MEETING: Lecture and exhibits.

Museum Based Fieldwork: Hunting for Type Molluscs on a National and International Scale.

Type specimens are essential to the study of malacology and are distributed across a wide range of museums in the UK and globally. In this talk I will discuss two projects, which highlight the importance of type material in research and for museum communities.

The Mollusca Types in Great Britain project is the beginning of an integrated access and learning project bringing together curators from across the museum sector. Malacological curators from Amgueddfa Cymru - National Museum Wales (AC-NMW) and The Natural History Museum, London (NHM) worked with staff at seven partner museums in six UK cities. Together they developed a jointly-held, globally accessible database and online resource connecting the Mollusca collections of National and other museums for the first time. The regional museum partners were given training focused on building confidence in recognising, researching, and interpreting the molluscan type specimens in their collections. The broader aims of this project were to strengthen and develop curatorial skills in specialist areas that could be transferable to other historically important natural history collections.

The Frenchman Arthur Morelet was one of the 19th century European amateurs who was actively involved in malacology. He made collecting trips to Portugal and the Azores, and to Cuba and

Central America and although he never visited, he was very much interested in malacofauna of Africa. On outline of his life and how he became interested in molluscs will be presented as well as a look at the taxa introduced by Morelet, their current systematic position and the problems encountered in locating type material.