An illustrated catalogue of Rudolf Sturany’s type specimens in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Austria (NHMW): Red Sea gastropods

Abstract

The Natural History Museum in Vienna hosts the samples of the late 19 th century Austro-Hungarian "Pola" expeditions to the Eastern Mediterranean and the Red Sea. Rudolf Sturany studied these samples and described several new species. The type material of 35 species and forms of gastropods collected in the Red Sea is listed and illustrated. For each species, the available type material is listed, the original description and a translation into English is provided, and the current taxonomic status of the species is commented upon whenever possible. All species are illustrated in colour and with SEM imaging, with the exception of Stylifer thielei, whose only specimen was broken by Johannes Thiele in Berlin to study the soft parts. Finally, a table of the Pola deep and coastal stations where molluscs were collected is provided, with modern names.

An illustrated catalogue of Rudolf Sturany’s type specimens in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Austria (NHMW): Red Sea bivalves

“…However, preprints ("Besonders abgedruckt") with double pagination were published in 1899 (date on their frontispiece) and are present in the library of the Natural History Museum of Vienna; therefore, this should be considered the correct year of publication for all new names. A similar situation occurred for some Red Sea gastropods (Albano et al 2017).…”

“…We here conclude our work to document the type specimens of Sturany's marine taxa, started with the Red Sea gastropods (Albano et al 2017) and continued with the deep-sea Mediterranean species , by treating the bivalves described from the Red Sea. We provide high-quality optical and SEM images and, to help overcome the language barrier, we translate all original German descriptions into English.…”

New records of non-indigenous molluscs from the eastern Mediterranean Sea

“…Remarks : This striking shell cannot be misidentified with any native Mediterranean triphorid. It belongs to a taxonomically difficult group of Viriola species whose validity is still uncertain, such as V. corrugata (Hinds, 1843), V. senafirensis (Sturany, 1903) and V. tricincta (Dunker, 1882) (Albano and Bakker 2016; Albano et al 2017). The Mediterranean specimens are closely similar to V. bayani in the colour pattern of white fletches on brown background and in the sculpture of obsolete orthocline axial riblets between the main spiral cords, a conclusion also shared by Angelidis and Polyzoulis (2018).…”

An illustrated catalogue of Rudolf Sturany’s type specimens in the Naturhistorisches Museum Wien, Austria (NHMW): more Red Sea species

“…In a series of illustrated catalogues, we revised the type material of the marine species described by Rudolf Sturany, curator of the molluscan collection at the Natural History Museum in Vienna between 1889 and 1922 (Albano et al 2017(Albano et al , 2018(Albano et al , 2019. Sturany worked on samples collected during the "Pola" expeditions to the Mediterranean and Red Sea (Schefbeck 1996;Stagl 2012) introducing 15 names for the eastern Mediterranean Sea and 56 from the Red Sea.…”