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Checklist of Australian Marine Bivalves & Gastropods

Project leaders: Dr Winston Ponder and Dr P. Middelfart.

The Australian marine molluscan fauna is very rich, containing about 8,000-10,000 named species, with several thousand additional species as yet unnamed. The majority of these species are members of the class Bivalvia (pipis, cockles, oysters, clams, scallops, shipworms) and Gastropoda (limpets, snails, slugs).
Surprisingly no checklist or catalogue of the Australian marine molluscs has been done. There are published checklists for some states exist, although nearly all of these were published many decades ago and are consequently very out of date and incomplete.

The checklist will contain information about the available name for valid species, details of the original publication and important subsequent publications. There will also be summary information about the biology and distribution of each valid species and a list of the synonyms.

Part of this large project includes the compilation of a comprehensive bibliography of publications on Australian Mollusca.

The project is being funded by ABRS and parts of both the checklist and bibliography will be available on the Web from 2000 as they are completed.

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