Annotated type catalogue of the Cephalopoda (Mollusca) in the Museum für Naturkunde, Humboldt University of Berlin

Abstract

This paper documents the type material of cephalopods, housed in the malacological collection of the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin (formerly the Zoological Museum Berlin, ZMB). The cephalopod collection comprises an important assemblage of original material from major scientific journeys, in particular the first German deep-sea expedition on board the steamer “Valdivia” 1898–1899 and the German South Polar Expedition 1901–1903 on the sailing vessel “Gauss”. This material renders the ZMB collection one of the main depositories in the world and the third biggest cephalopod type collection in Europe according to the results of a comparative evaluation presented in this paper. The majority of the cephalopod species were described by Carl Chun (1852–1914) and Johannes Thiele (1860–1935). Since the ZMB collection was not easily accessible for a long time, recently published accounts of type repositories for cephalopods gave insufficent or erroneous information concerning the type material in the Museum für Naturkunde. Thus, the present paper provides an annotated and updated catalogue of all cephalopod types in the ZMB collection, including the references in which the taxa were first described, type locality data for a total of 42 taxa, of which the type material of 41 taxa is still extant; only the holotype of Velodona togata Chun, 1915 could not be located in the collection. A systematic list of the taxa, assigned to 20 families, is given.