The Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum, a specialized natural history museum, is a collecting museum. Its collection of shells and preserved specimens represents a large fraction of the global biodiversity of mollusks. The Museum houses a collection of worldwide and local mollusks that encompasses about 150,000 lots. The collection is expanding, with a growing focus on mollusks from the coast of southwest Florida, its barrier islands, and the Gulf of Mexico. The increasingly regional nature of the collection has attracted a large number of national and international students and scientists who visit the Museum to examine specimens in their fields of expertise. Records of our holdings are managed through a database management system and searches of the collection may be performed online.
Search the Database
Introduction
This search engine provides read-only access to a current version of the Malacological Collection Database maintained in the Research Department at The Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum, Sanibel, Florida, USA.
The database consists of 41 fields of information for each lot (record) of mollusks in the Museum’s collection. Searches may be made by using 12 of these fields, 5 taxonomic, 6 geographic, or catalog number (BMSM No.). Two kinds of reports (summary, full) are available for each search. The first (summary) report shows data in 12 basic fields; 20 records per page will be returned. The BMSM No. in this table is a link to a more complete report (37 fields) on the selected lot.
How to Search
Searches may be made on single words or parts of words inserted in one or several fields. A wildcard symbol (%) is automatically inserted before and after each word. Words in two or more fields perform searches using logical “And”, wherein the combination of words must be true.
The Shell Museum would like to thank Dick Willis, Jon Greenlaw, and Tina Yorgey for their dedication to this project. We are also grateful to the Sanibel-Captiva Shell Club for sponsoring the Web search engine created by Calusa Graphics of Sanibel Island, Florida.