Melanopsis sowerbyi Pallary, 1920

Neubauer, Thomas A., 2016, A nomenclator of extant and fossil taxa of the Melanopsidae (Gastropoda, Cerithioidea), ZooKeys 602, pp. 1-358 : 257

† Melanopsis sowerbyi Pallary, 1920 [invalid]

Original source.

Pallary 1920b: 116.

Type horizon.

Headon Beds, Priabonian, Eocene.

Type locality.

“Hordwell” ( Sowerby 1821-1823: 36), United Kingdom.

Remarks.

Introduced for one of the illustrated specimens of Melanopsis fusiformis Sowerby, 1846 (pl. 221, fig. 9) [sic]. The name is based on an error of Pallary (1920b), who only had the French translation of Sowerby’s "Mineral conchology" from 1845 (not 1846) at hand, where figures were organized in a different way than in the original version. Fig. 9 in the 1845-version corresponds to Fig. 7 on pl. 332 of the original publication (Sowerby 1822). Newton (1891) had introduced the new name Melanopsis pseudosubulata for that specimen and another specimen already ( Sowerby 1821-1823: pl. 332, figs 6-7). Since Pallary mixed up the figures, he considered Newton’s taxonomic separation misleading and, in order to settle the problem, introduced Melanopsis sowerbyi . Consequently, Melanopsis sowerbyi is a junior objective synonym of Melanopsis pseudosubulata .