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Porifera newsNew material from Oscar Schmidt's collectionAdded on 2025-10-30 17:02:57 by Cárdenas, Paco
Cárdenas, P. & Meister, M. (2025) The Schmidt collection of envelopes in the Musée Zoologique in Strasbourg. Journal of the History of Collections.A collection of 488 small envelopes, discovered in the Musée Zoologique in Strasbourg, France, has been shown to have belonged to one of the earliest sponge taxonomists, the German Oscar Schmidt (1823–1886). The majority of the envelopes, which are labelled in Schmidt’s handwriting, still contain either loose sponge spicules (structural elements serving as a sponge's skeleton) or sponge fragments relating especially to Schmidt’s milestone studies on the north-west Atlantic deep-sea sponges. The specimens were sent to him between 1869 and 1879 by the marine zoologist Alexander Agassiz (1835–1910), who became director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. Through three examples (Fangophilina submersa, Cladorhiza concrescens and Geodia globus), we show how these envelopes can be used as a heuristic collection to reveal new type material (i.e. specimens formally associated with the species scientific name during the original description), and to reveal new information on some specimens, while also shedding light on Schmidt’s working routine.
Link: https://academic.oup.com/jhc/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jhc/fhaf008/8306375 [Overview] [Login] |