Een bijzondere schelp bij een bijzonder afscheid

A few days before the final closing of the former Zoological Museum Amsterdam (ZMA) in Amsterdam the author visited the almost empty building. In a waste container he saw several shells dumped there by ZMA curator Rob Moolenbeek. The shells had no labels specifying their find and therefore these had not been included in the collection. Consequently, these shells were not transferred with the other shells constituting the ZMA collection to the Netherlands Centre for Biodiversity Naturalis in Leiden. One shell attracted the author’s attention and was taken home. It was a specimen of Bufonaria echinata (Link, 1807) which species has usually a number of straight fingers on the side of the shell. But this one was special: the middle finger of five fingers was erect instead of horizontally aligned. Almost as if it were saying “F..k you”, being against the closing down of the famous Dutch institute. The shell has now a special place in my private collection. Just for fun I named this shell: Bufonaria (Bufonaria) echinata “ZMA”. The abbreviation ZMA being phonetically written down in Dutch yields “zet-em-a”, which is also a Latin word derived from old Greek meaning ’being against’. But here ZMA is used to indicate this paper is not meant as a taxonomical act.