Nelisiwe Manukuza, KZN Museum
As we were checking the condition of some of the very old material in our collection we came across the first type specimen recorded in the museum. Our first recorded mollusc type specimen is Ocenebra natalensis (Smith, 1906) which is now accepted as Favartia natalensis (E. A. Smith, 1906). He described the species in the Annals of the Natal Museum 1 (38): 1-7, and donated the type series to the museum through his friend, an amateur collector of molluscs and books, Henry Burnup who was the first mollusc collector of the Kwa-Zulu Natal museum in 1879.
Originally it was described as a “cotype” and later designated as a lectotype (a specimen designated as the type of a species or subspecies when no holotype was designated by the original author of the name) by Fair, R. in 1976. It holds NMSA catalogue number 36 and the type number T479’. The reason why it doesn’t have type number “one” is because the concept of designating type numbers was introduced later than regular catalogue numbers, so it ended up as T479 not T1.