Dear Tilo:

I have now located my copy of Matsumoto, 1979 that I failed to find
yesterday.  He has a very poor figure of a shell labelled in the text (p.
37, pl. 7, fig. 8) as Oocorys japonica Kuroda et Teramachi. The sculpture is
identical to that of O. tosaensis (as figured in The Nautilus) but the angle
is bad and the aperture seems much less constricted. The locality is not
familiar to me but is something like "Ghost Castle offshore" (400m).  On the
plate caption the size is given as 4.0 cm. There is no mention of this being
a type.

Yes, moshiki-hyôhon means type-specimen.  The Toba Aquarium possibly has a
manuscript notation on the label showing it to be the type specimen, but it
was never described.  This is not at all uncommon in old museum collections.

There is no "index by type ID" either in the Matsumoto work or in the Kuroda
lists.

Azuma (1950: 29) lists "Oocorys japonica Kuroda et Teramachi (MS). 120 fms."

I am not aware of any publications of the Toba Aquarium but there may have
been some.  In the 1950s there were few places to deposit type material.
The Japanese malacologists of pre- and post- WWII were very good at anatomy
but were lacking in an understanding of systematic nomenclature.  Manuscript
names floated around without concern just as they did in mid-19th England
(as discussed in my recent papers on Reeve and the Sowerbys).

If I can be of assistance, please let me know.

Regards,

Dick

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