>Specimens never existed, of course, of the imaginary
>shells (e.g., trivalved mollusk) and fish that Audubon told him about
and which he proceeded to uncritically describe as new!

This happened after Rafinesque visited Audubon and tried to use
Audubon's violin to collect bats, which Rafinesque claimed were new
species.

A related problem is the fact that Rafinesque and many other early
workers did not indicate a particular species as the type of a genus,
so later literature must be searched for identification of a type.  For
example, Rafinesque included a few species in his new genus Rotundaria.
 Agassiz designated tuberculatus (currently listed as Cyclonaias
tuberculatus, though it's really a Quadrula) as the type species, and
this was followed widely until 1922, when Ortmann and Walker pointed
out that Herrmansen had previously designated subrotunda (currently
listed as Obovaria subrotunda, though Obovaria turns out to be another
messed up Rafinesque name) as the type of Rotundaria.  However, I
recently found that Valenciennes had cited tuberculatus as the type of
Rotundaria before Herrmansen.

I'll need to check the box again to see which Aldrich types we have.
They're miscellaneous exotic land snails.  We're working on a more
formal report of this as well.

----------------------------------------
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections
University of Alabama, Box 870345
Tuscaloosa AL 35487
"James gave the huffle of a snail in
danger But no one heard him at all"  A.
A. Milne

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