Jean François Xavier Roffiaen (1820–1898) was a Belgian landscape painter with a profound interest in malacology. A founding member of the Société malacologique de Belgique, Roffiaen contributed several publications on molluscs. Among such studies, his 1868 paper on Swiss terrestrial and freshwater gastropods introduced 14 new taxa (species and varieties) belonging to the Clausiliidae, Discidae, Helicidae, Lymnaeidae, Valvatidae, and Viviparidae. However, Roffiaen’s malacological contributions largely faded from recognition, primarily due to the unknown whereabouts of his type material. This study revisits his work by identifying and analysing specimens from the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences (RBINS). Of the 14 taxa described by Roffiaen, type specimens for nine (including the two full species) have been recovered, enabling a reassessment of their taxonomic status as synonyms of better-known and widespread species. The serendipitous finding of these type specimens reaffirms the importance of maintaining museum collections, and the implementation of digitization programs to uncover/recover such “lost” information, enabling it to be made available to the scientific community at large.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2025
Brittle and basket stars (ophiuroids) are one of five extant classes of the phylum Echinodermata and have a fossil record dating back almost 500 million years to the Early Ordovician. Today, they remain diverse and widespread, with over 260 described genera and 2,077 extant species globally (Stöhr et al. 2018), more than any other class of echinoderm. Ophiuroid species are found across all marine habitats from the intertidal shore to the abyss. In southern Africa, the ophiuroid fauna has been studied extensively by a number of authors and is relatively wellknown. The last published review of the southern African Ophiuroidea however was by Clark & Courtman-Stock in 1976. It included 101 species reported from within the boundaries of South Africa. In the 40 years since that publication the number of species has risen to 136. This identification guide includes a taxonomic key to all 136 species, and gives key references, istribution maps, diagnoses, scaled photographs (where possible), and a synthesis of known ecological and depth information for each. The guide is designed to be comprehensive, well illustrated and easy to use for both naturalists and professional biologists. Taxonomic terms, morphological characteristics and technical expressions are defined and described in detail, with illustrations to clarify some aspects of the terminology. A checklist of all species in the region is also included, and indicates which species are endemic (33), for which we report significant range extensions (23), which have been recorded as new to the South African fauna (28) since the previous monograph of Clark & Courtman-Stock (1976) and which have undergone taxonomic revisions since that time (28).
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RBINS Staff Publications 2019
A re-description of the little-known holothurian species Holothuria (Lessonothuria) lineata Ludwig, 1875 is given. It is based on the single recovered type specimen and an individual recently collected on Glorioso Islands, near Madagascar. A key to separate three closely related and commonly confused species, i.e., Holothuria (Lessonothuria) pardalis Selenka, 1867, Holothuria (Lessenothuria) verrucosa Selenka, 1867 and Holothuria (Lessonothuria) insignis Ludwig, 1875, is presented.
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RBINS Staff Publications 2019
