Page 52 - Thola Issue 17

50 Conchology Collection
COMING OUT OF ITS
SHELL
Over the past few years, the Museum has begun paying long overdue attention to its ‘orphan’ collections. These are without a formal and properly qualified curator, with all the attendant risks of neglect. David Allan, Curator of Birds, reports on one such waif: the shell collection.
The conchology collection dates back to the Museum’s earliest years. Some of the oldest material is attributed to J.S. Steel, the institution’s founder in the late 19th Century. The first formal Curator, J.F. Quekett, specialised in this group and he acquired many of the original shells in the collection. Other noteworthy contributors in
the pioneering years were H.J. Puzey and H.C. Burnup, the latter an early malacologist at the KwaZulu-Natal Museum, as it is known today. Various of these older specimens are of particular note as they featured in a landmark 660-page monograph on the non-marine molluscs of southern Africa authored by M. Connolly in 1939. Apparently prominent among these early collectors was J.D. Casey, who seems to have contributed
more material than all the others put together. Collections & Recollections, Clive Quickelberge’s history of the Museum, tells us that one of the Museum’s most distinguished early benefactors, Colonel H.C. Harford, was known to have donated an astonishing
22 000 shells during the initial part of E.C. Chubb’s long tenure at the head of the institution. Strangely, there is no evidence whatsoever of this vast collection in our holdings nor any
ABOVE: African slit shell Bayerotrochus africanus occurs in deep waters off KwaZulu- Natal. The deep slit in the outer lip is to assist in expelling stale water and waste matter.
BELOW: Rina and Jurie Matthee with part of Rina’s impressive private shell collection.
information as to its eventual fate. After this seemingly promising
genesis, the Museum’s shell collection sadly retreated into the shadows as the institution focused on its selected specialities in the fields of entomology, ornithology and, most recently, mammalogy. A tacit ‘division of labour’ with the nearby KwaZulu-Natal Museum in Pietermaritzburg, which has developed world-class eminence in its Malacology Department, was likely also a driving force behind this abandonment. It is clear that private shell collections continued to be donated to the Museum, but these were often hobbyist in nature and
all too frequently devoid of correct details related to provenance. Even worse, these assortments were simply stockpiled, with no attempt at proper curation, and they may even have been plundered to service other agendas. In some cases, labels, where these exist, have become separated from their attendant specimens and even lost entirely. The time for a makeover has been in arrears for some time.
thola: VOLUME 17. 2014/15
Photo credit: David Allan