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Delaware Museum of Nature and Science – Mollusks (DMNH-Mollusk)

The Museum's mollusk collection consists of more than 2 million specimens, making it one of the largest in the United States. The 220,000 cataloged lots represent more than 18,000 species. Worldwide in scope and covering all seven living classes of mollusks, our holdings include marine gastropods (45%), land and freshwater gastropods (30%), marine bivalves (15%), freshwater bivalves (5%) and other (5%). The Museum's mollusk collection is primarily dry shells, with some alcohol preserved cephalopod specimens. Most specimens are recent; however there is some Cenozoic fossil material. Our type collection contains more than 1,200 lots.

Contacts: Elizabeth Shea, eshea@delmns.org (ORCID #: 0000-0002-5379-8410)
Sr. Colln Mgr: Alex Kittle, akittle@delmns.org
Homepage: http://www.delmns.org/mollusks/
Collection Type: Preserved Specimens
Management: Data snapshot of local collection database
Last Update: 22 March 2024
DwC-Archive Access Point: https://invertebase.org/portal/content/dwca/DMNH-Mollusk_DwC-A.zip
Digital Metadata: EML File
Usage Rights: CC0 1.0 (Public-domain)
Collection Statistics
  • 235,868 specimen records
  • 76,690 (33%) georeferenced
  • 21 (0.01%) with images (39 total images)
  • 207,492 (88%) identified to species
  • 521 families
  • 3,906 genera
  • 16,098 species
  • 16,360 total taxa (including subsp. and var.)
Extra Statistics
Taxon Distribution
Taxon Distribution
This project is supported by the National Science Foundation's Division of Environmental Biology through an award titled "Advancing Revisionary Taxonomy and Systematics: Integrative Research and Training in Tropical Taxonomy" (DEB-1456674). Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed on this website are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.