The Mollusc Collection
Last updated | 31/08/2010
Perth Museum and Art Gallery holds a large collection of mollusc shells with about 20,000 specimens. Molluscs are a large and diverse group that includes slugs, snails, clams, limpets, squid, octopus and sea-slugs. Many of the specimens were donated by the President of the Perthshire Society of Natural Science, Henry Coates (1859-1935). He published a catalogue of the collection in 1925.
The collection contains 1,108 British land and freshwater molluscs including freshwater pearl mussels, 871 British marine shells and 17,000 specimens collected from around the world from the Arctic to the Andes. Among the rarer Perthshire specimens are
Vertigo antivertigo, Anodonta cygnea, Helix aculeata and H. rufescens.The collection can be consulted by appointment. It is not on display.
