Andrew Dickson asks, 'When a new molluscan species is described a single holotype is designated. Why are certain holotypes sent to certain places? What type of organizations are allowed to retain holotypes?' The ICZN recommends that all type specimens be housed 'in a museum or similar institution where it will be safely preserved and will be accessible for purposes of research'. For neotypes (replacements for lost holotypes), this is required. After 250 years of trying to hunt down lost or unlabeled type specimens that the author just HAD to keep, biologists are fed up with private ownership of the name-bearers of species. Museums sometimes lose type specimens too, but not as often. As long-lasting public institutions, museum collections tend to survive death, economic downturns, war, and other disasters far better than private collections do. The International Code of Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN) is a voluntary set of rules. Like the rules of baseball, though, if you don't follow them then no one will want to play with you. Editors of reputable journals usually reject articles that state that the type specimen of a new species is to be held in private hands. Taxonomists sometimes refuse to report on specimens in private collections, since their words will not be backed up by a publicly available collection. And so on. What types of institutions? Well, the ICZN left that part purposefully broad, but I would venture to say that most type specimens are held in the natural history museums or other collections of nations, states/provinces, cities, universities, academies of science, federal and state agencies, and so on. Some museums are owned privately but act like public institutions, such as the American Museum of Natural History. A great number of the holotypes that were in private collections during the nineteenth century have ended up in public collections, mostly by donation. Some are still in private hands, and many are lost -- some simply because they were never labeled as types. As to why certain holotypes are sent to certain places, generally it is a good idea to keep a specimen in a collection with others of its kind. The California Academy of Sciences has a great California collection, the Bishop Museum focuses on the Pacific region, and so on. Some collections are rich in, say, cones, and it is more convenient to visit one collection with twenty cones than twenty collections with one cone. Also, some collections have facilities to store specimens in alcohol, and others do not. And often a specimen is sent to a museum because they have a curator who is interested in that group of mollusks. To the collector, it may seem unreasonable that a prized specimen, the first of its species to be discovered, should be given away to a museum. I hope I've explained the other side of the story. Often, the consolation prize is to name the new species for the discoverer, making the collector as unique as the holotype. Andrew K. Rindsberg Geological Survey of Alabama 'Eleventh Hour Enterprises'