Rodrigo B. Salvador

UiT The Arctic University of Norway · The Arctic University Museum of Norway

Brazil is a megadiverse country for many (if not most) animal taxa, harboring a significant portion of Earth's biodiversity. Still, the Brazilian land snail fauna is not that diverse at first sight, comprising around 700 native species. Most of these species were described by European and North American naturalists based on material obtained during...

Natural history collections are now being championed as key to broad ecological studies, especially those involving human impacts in the Anthropocene. However, collections are going through a crisis that threatens their present and future value, going beyond underfunding/understaffing to a more damaging practice: current researchers are no longer d...

Although terrestrial gastropods are remarkably diverse, our knowledge of them is still lacking, especially for species from the Global South. As such, new tools to help researchers collect data on these organisms are very welcome. With this in mind, we investigated Brazilian observations on iNaturalist to assess the feasibility of the data availabl...

There is broad recognition by practicing taxonomists that the field is going through a crisis, which has been dubbed the "taxonomic impediment". There are many aspects involved in said crisis, but publication practices in taxonomy are often neglected or relegated to the backseat. We provide an initial foray into this topic via a worldwide survey wi...

The superfamily Orthalicoidea comprises approximately 2,000 species of terrestrial gastropods, mostly concentrated in the Neotropics but also present in southern Africa and Oceania. We provide a multi-marker molecular phylogeny of this superfamily, reassessing its family- and genus-level classification. We exclude two families from the group, Odont...

Only 17 endemic land snail species are known so far on the Lesser Antillean island of Martinique, most of which are macrogastropods that are easily visible, and thus, easily collectable. On the other hand, species of microgastropods remain undersampled and overlooked. Based on recently collected shells from Mount Vauclin, we describe a new species...

The silvana -beds are the main component of the Upper Freshwater Molasse (“Obere Süßwassermolasse” or OSM) in southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland, named after the land snail Palaeotachea silvana (Klein, 1853). After initial disputes in the literature, in the 1920’s, malacologist Wilhelm Wenz better defined the silvana -beds lithology and its...

The catalogued collection of South American terrestrial gastropods, including the Caribbean ABC islands and Trinidad & Tobago, of the Auckland War Memorial Museum (AM), New Zealand, is discussed here. In total, 264 specimen lots from South America were found in the AM collection, including eight type lots. Twelve of the specimens represent new geog...

Augustus Hamilton (1853-1913) was a New Zealand ethnologist and naturalist who amassed a significant collection of fossils, mostly of birds, during his career. Today, those fossils are housed in the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (NMNZ). While some fossils have been catalogued and integrated into the collection of the NMNZ, a large part re...

Gastropod samples were collected during expeditions to caves in Bahia state, northeastern Brazil, and are studied herein. Collection took place over the past five years, and gastropods were found in 14 caves distributed across six different municipalities: Campo Formoso, Carinhanha, Coribe, Feira da Mata, Central, and Ituaçu. A total of 19 species-...

The impacts of biological invasions remain poorly known for some habitats, regions and taxa. To date, there has been no comprehensive effort to review and synthesize the impacts of invasive mollusc species in South America. In this paper, we provide a synoptic view on what is known on documented socio-ecological impacts of aquatic no-native mollusc...

A new species of giant petrel, Macronectes tinae sp. nov., is described from the Pliocene deposits of South Taranaki, New Zealand. The holotype is a near complete skull and the paratype a fragmentary left humerus; both come from the Tangahoe Formation, dating from the late Pliocene (Piacenzian or “Waipipian”; age estimated as ca. 3.36–3.06 Ma). The...

A new species of megasnail, Megalobulimus diluvianus sp. nov., is herein described based on subfossil material from limestone caves in the area of Lagoa Santa, Minas Gerais state, southeastern Brazil. The specimens come from a context of archaeological strata of early Holocene age. Considering the morphological features of the shell, the new specie...

Bioinvasions are one of the main causes of the decline of native biodiversity. Indothais lacera (Born, 1778) is a carnivorous gastropod, native to the Indo-Pacific. We present the first records of I. lacera on the Brazilian coast and the first record of this invasive species in the Western Atlantic. The specimens were found in two locations in the...

Ecosystems provide benefits to humans, including provisioning, regulating, and cultural services. However, invasive species can threaten ecosystem well-functioning and services provided. One invasive species with such potential is the New Zealand mud snail (NZMS) Potamopyrgus antipodarum. The aims of this study are focused on the quantitative revie...

The genus Radiodiscus includes minute terrestrial snails occurring throughout the American continent. We assessed the conservation status of eight poorly known Chilean Radiodiscus species using the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and NatureServe categories and criteria. Under the IUCN guidelines the species were assessed using...

The girdled snail Hygromia cinctella originates from southern Europe but has been introduced to countries in northern Europe and, more recently, to Aotearoa New Zealand. In the latter country, the girdled snail was first noted in 2015 in Wellington, but it has since spread to other regions of the North Island. We report here the rapid spread of thi...

Recent collection efforts in caves of Mato Grosso state, Brazilian Midwest, have brought to light specimens of four Ne-ritimorpha and Stylommatophora land-snail species previously unrecorded from that state: Helicina fulva d'Orbigny, 1835 (Family Helicinidae), Streptartemon abunaensis (F. Baker, 1914) and Streptartemon decipiens (Crosse, 1865) (fam...

In an ongoing study on deep-water Vetigastropoda from SE-NE Brazil, the remarkably similar appearances of two supposedly unrelated species drew our attention. The description of Calliostoma frumari García, 2007 was based on four empty shells collected 37 km off Key West, Florida Keys, USA, by a private expedition. Watson’s (1879) description of Bas...

Descripción y actividad del eMIAS (especialistas sobre Moluscos Introducidos en América del Sur)

The movement of species is among the most serious environmental threats of the new millennium, as the transplantation of species beyond their native or historical range has intensified in the last five decades. Traditionally, studies on bioinvasions have focused on species that have been introduced, deliberately or accidentally, to biogeographic re...

Veintinueve especialistas en Moluscos Introducidos de América del Sur (eMIAS), de siete países, trabajan en forma cooperativa desde el año 2016, con el objetivo incrementar y fortalecer el conocimiento de la malacofauna no-nativa y trasplantada, con la cual se busca prevenir y controlar los impactos que provocan estas especies. Cada uno de los inte...

The exotic Japanese jumping snail, Ovachlamys fulgens, was first recorded in Santa Catarina state, Brazil, in 2013. Based on data gathered from the literature, natural history collections, field samplings, and the iNaturalist platform, we assess its current distribution in the country. Our data show that the jumping snail has had a dramatic range e...

Idiopyrgus is a relict genus of freshwater snails from Brazil traditionally classified in the family Pomatiopsidae. Herein, we use molecular data from newly acquired specimens to test that classification through Bayesian inference phylogenetic analysis. We conclude that Idiopyrgus belongs in the Gondwanan family Tomichiidae, together with the Afric...

Pupilloidea is a diverse group of land snails, most of which are of minute size. Because of that, Paleogene pupil-loid fossils are often overlooked and scarcely studied, partly because of a historical collection bias against small-sized fossils and partly due to the preservation bias against their fragile shells. The Borgloon Formation in Belgium (...

An up-to-date list of exclusively cave-dwelling gastropod species recorded in Brazil is presented including updated taxonomy, detailed geographic information, and illustration of types. The list includes 18 cave-exclusive (troglobitic) gastropods encompassing 15 land and three freshwater species, with the status of further species pending additiona...

Four gastropod species including two new species (?Tinnyea sp., Cyclophoridae gen. et sp. indet., Metalycaeus fossilis n. sp., and Tortaxis zhangpuensis n. sp.) are described from the mid-Miocene Zhangpu amber. Among them, ?Tinnyea sp. is potentially the first fossil record of this group in lake systems of East Asia, outside of Mediterranean and Pa...

The genus Mesoneritina was first described to contain a single fossil neritid from the Lower Cretaceous of Nebraska, USA. Further Jurassic and Cretaceous neritids from the USA, Greenland, Europe and China were later classified in this genus. However, while the North American species all share similar morphologies, the Chinese forms seem to be a dis...

The punctoid land snail family Charopidae, as currently defined, is a paraphyletic assemblage of taxa with Gondwanan distribution. It is represented in Africa largely by the pinwheels (genus Trachycystis and allies) and afrodontas (genus Afrodonta and allies), as well as a few additional genera, such as Reticulapex, Pilula, and Helenoconcha. Herein...

Herein, we revise an extensive set of mollusc fossils from the Upper Freshwater Molasse deposits of Öhningen palaeolake (SW Germany; Middle Miocene, MN7). Based on material housed in paleontological collections in Europe and North America, we present the first thorough systematic account of the phylum from this historic locality. A total of ten spe...

Fernando de Noronha (henceforth ‘Noronha’) is an oceanic archipelago of volcanic origin, located ~350 km off the northeast coast of Brasil (Fig. 1). The eponymous main island was an important midway port in the Portuguese exploitation of Brasilian resources during the 16th and 17th centuries (Lins & Silva, 2013). The island was also briefly occupie...

The New Zealand huia (Heteralocha acutirostris) had the most extreme bill sexual dimorphism among modern birds. Given the quick extinction of the species, the cause of the dimorphism could only be hypothesised to reflect different trophic niches and reduce male/female competition. We tested that hypothesis by combining museum specimens, geometric m...

A new species of rail, Gallirallus astolfoi sp. nov., is described from Rapa Island (Rapa Iti), French Polynesia. The holotype (and single known specimen) is a left tarsometatarsus recovered from Tangarutu Cave. This rail species was apparently endemic to Rapa Iti and potentially flightless. It became extinct after human colonisation of the island.

The Fernando de Noronha Archipelago off NE Brazil harbors a few unique terrestrial gastropod species. One of them, the monotypic genus Ridleyconcha Christensen, 2020, presents such an idiosyncratic shell morphology that, in the 130 years since its description, it has been variously allocated in unrelated families: Streptaxidae, Endodontidae, Charop...

The terrestrial and freshwater malacofauna of southern Bahia is little known, especially in comparison to the well-studied eastern portion of the state covered by remnants of Atlantic Forest. We present here a synopsis of all gastropod species known from the central southern region of Bahia state, known as 'Centro-Sul Baiano' , focusing on four mun...

Despite the absence of cuttlefish in Aotearoa New Zealand waters, cuttlebones and cuttlebone fragments have been reported and collected in the country since the early twentieth century. Not all could be reliably identified. As such, here we review all cuttlebone material collected from New Zealand shores available in natural history collections, as...

Our results present a taxonomic and palaeoecological study on non-marine gastropods from the latest Cretaceous to Paleocene deposits of the Pingyi Basin, Shandong Province, eastern China. These gastropods are systematically described: three species belonging to three genera including Physa dongtaiensis Gu, 1989, Hydrobia datangensis Yü, 1977, and t...

A specimen of Solaropsidae from the collection of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University (Philadelphia, USA) was recognised as a potential new species based on shell morphology. With support from a multi-locus molecular phylogenetic analysis, a new species is described here: Solaropsis penthesileae sp. nov. It is native to the Amazon...

Despite its natural focus on the New Zealand region, the malacological collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (NMNZ), also includes a variety of specimens from elsewhere in the world, including a fair share of South American specimens. Examination of this material reveals valuable distributional data for several species, as well...

The terrestrial gastropod family Thysanophoridae is reported herein for the first time from Brazil. The new record stems from a 2015 survey in the Reserva Biológica de Pedra Talhada, a protected Atlantic Forest fragment in Alagoas state, in the northeastern part of the country. Only two empty juvenile shells were found, and the specimens can be ten...

The terrestrial gastropod family Thysanophoridae is reported herein for the first time from Brazil. The new record stems from a 2015 survey in the Reserva Biológica de Pedra Talhada, a protected Atlantic Forest fragment in Alagoas state, in the northeastern part of the country. Only two empty juvenile shells were found, and the specimens can be ten...

The Chatham Island Duck, Anas chathamica, is one of many New Zealand bird species that became extinct after Polynesian arrival. The Chatham Island Duck was a large flightless bird, with salt glands on its skull, which led to the hypothesis that it lived in a marine habitat. We tested this hypothesis using a combination of stable isotope analysis (c...

A new species belonging to the hitherto monotypic genus Spiripockia Simone, 2012 of cave-dwelling freshwater gastropods is described. Spiripockia umbraticola sp. nov. is diagnosable by its more turriform beige to dark brown shell, less expanded body whorl and peristome, the teleoconch sculpture consisting of thorn-like triangular structures, the pr...

Repeated scuba diving visits to Saba, Caribbean Netherlands, from 2011 to 2020 allowed us to add 51 species of marine molluscs to the island’s species checklist, in an attempt to get closer to having a full list of all the species that live around the island. Th e new records include 40 gastropods (over half of which are sea slugs), seven bivalves,...

A non-marine gastropod fauna from the continuous uppermost Campanian to Maastrichtian deposits of the Jiaolai Basin (eastern North China) was studied. Four species attributed to four genera and an undetermined species were described, including Truncatella jiaozhouensis sp. nov., ?Pomatiopsidae gen. et sp. indet., ?Hydrobia datangensis Yü, 1977, Val...

Samples of terrestrial gastropods were collected year-round in seven caves in Presidente Olegário municipality, Minas Gerais state, southeastern Brazil, during several expeditions from 2012 to 2014. Twenty-four taxa (plus a single freshwater species), mainly stylommatophorans, were found in the material. The following species are reported for the f...

In 1900, Henry Suter, a New Zealand malacologist, described six land snail taxa from South America, mostly from Brazil. These taxa received little further attention from malacologists and the unusual depository of its type specimens (New Zealand) caused much confusion in the literature. Suter’s types and taxa are thus revisited in the present work....

Land snails in mid-Cretaceous Burmese amber have aroused interest from palaeontologists in recent years. Here we describe three newly discovered species and a new genus belonging to families Pupinidae and Diplommatinidae: Cretatortulosa cretakachinensis sp. nov., Rhaphaulus zhuoi sp. nov. and Pulchraspira teneristoma gen. et sp. nov., using classic...

Good science communication should give the public the tools to make informed decisions and take action, which can be particularly important for nature conservation. The crisis in invertebrate conservation might be rooted in public prejudices against invertebrate animals, which are perceived as the unpopular 97% of Earth's animal biodiversity. As su...

New collection efforts in the limestone caves of Parque Nacional Cavernas do Peruaçu, Minas Gerais state, Brazil, has brought to light specimens belonging to three orthalicoid land snail species previously unrecorded from that state: Kora nigra Simone, 2015 and Kora rupestris Salvador & Simone, 2016 (Bulimulidae), and Leiostracus subtuszonatus (Pil...

The Brasilian territory is very extensive and harbors ~20,000caves, over half of which are calcareous (Fig. 1; CECAV, 2020). A reduced number of the ~ 700 terrestrial and nearly260 freshwater gastropod species reported from Brasil (Simone, 2006; Birckolz et al., 2016; Salvador, 2019) inhabit cave environments exclusively. Since the description of t...

The molluscan fauna of southwestern Brazilian Amazon is poorly known due to the lack of focused collection efforts in the region since the early 20 th century. The present study provides an inventory of the terrestrial gastropods from a forest fragment in the eastern Acre state, Brazil: the Reserva Florestal Humaitá. Live specimens and empty shells...

Abstract. The purpose of this application, under Article 23.9.5 of the Code, is to conserve the specific name of Helix spirorbis Deshayes, 1859 (currently Scolodonta spirorbis), a junior primary homonym of Helix spirorbis Linnaeus, 1758 (currently Anisus spirorbis). These names are currently in use, respectively, for species in two different famili...

The classification of terrestrial sundial snails has a long and contentious history; they have been diversely classified in Camaenidae, Pleurodontidae, Polygyridae, and also in their own family, Solaropsidae. Two genera have been recently removed from Solaropsidae (Polygyratia Gray, 1847 and Ridleya Ancey, 1901), but the status of its 3 remaining g...

A small collection containing thirty-nine lots of South African Streptaxidae land snails is housed in the collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (NMNZ). This material previously belonged to British/South African malacologist Henry C. Burnup, who either donated it to, or exchanged it with New Zealand-based Swiss malacologist Henry...

We introduce herein Lanayrella gen. nov. to accommodate two Acteonidae species that have proven resistant to stable classification: Tornatella vagabunda Mabille, 1885 and Acteon ringei Strebel, 1905. The new genus is diagnosed by a protoconch fully immersed within the shell and a platform-like columellar region of the aperture, which bears a strong...

The genus Habeastrum Simone, 2019 was recently described based on empty shells, counting with two troglobite species. Concho-logical features allowed a preliminary classification in the caenogastropod family Diplommatinidae, but this family allocation was left open to future studies. Herein, we present a detailed anatomical study of newly acquired...

Helicodiscus Morse, 1864 (family Helicodiscidae) is a genus of terrestrial snails with over 20 valid species (MolluscaBase 2020) and distributed almost exclusively over North America (Solem 1984). Helicodiscus theresa Thiele, 1927 has been described as native to Brazil, but herein we reassert the identity of this species as the North American Helic...

A small collection of Vietnamese door snails (family Clausiliidae) was recently (re)discovered in the malacological collection of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa (NMNZ). This material previously belonged to the famed shell collection of Belgian malacologist Philippe Dautzenberg (1849-1935) and was eventually acquired by, or donated to,...

We present the first report of an exotic snail from Takapourewa (also known as Stephens Island), New Zealand: Oxychilus alliarius (J.S. Miller, 1822), the garlic snail (Stylommatophora: Oxychilidae). This species has been introduced worldwide; it is widespread in New Zealand, where it is potentially problematic to the native fauna. We also revise t...

A phylogenetic analysis using a combination of mitochondrial (COI, 16S) and nuclear markers (ITS2, 28S) indicated that Punctoidea, as previously interpreted, is polyphyletic. It comprises two main groups, containing northern hemisphere (Laurasian) and predominantly southern hemisphere (Gondwanan) taxa respectively, treated here as separate superfam...

We report the first Brazilian record of Leiostracus demerarensis (L. Pfeiffer, 1861) from Pará and Maranhão states. The distribution of this species now comprises Guyana, Suriname, French Guiana, and northern Brazil. Furthermore, given the uncertainty in generic and familial allocation of this species (either Bostryx Troschel, 1847, Bulimulidae, or...

A new species of Streptartemon Kobelt, 1905 land snail from Santos, SE Brazil, is herein described as Streptartemon waukeen sp. nov., from specimens originally found in an urban garden. The new species is distributed along coastal urban areas from southern Espírito Santo state to São Paulo state. It can be diagnosed from its congeners by the follow...

Herein, we present a taxonomic revision of the genus Polygyratia Gray, 1847, with a new systematic placement in Scolodontidae and containing only the species Polygyratia polygyrata (Born, 1778). We offer an updated morphological description and geographical distribution, based on museum specimens and occurrence data gathered from literature and onl...

Supplementary file from the article: https://zse.pensoft.net/article/51047/