In a paper published posthumously in the April 2020 issue of the National Shell Museum’s scientific journal, The Nautilus, Dr. G. Thomas Watters from the Museum of Biological Diversity at Ohio State University in Columbus, and his collaborators, named the new species Rolleia simonaikeni, a half-an-inch wide, attractive land snail from the Dominican Republic. The species was named after Simon Aiken, from the UK, who collected some of the specimens in the study. Dr. Watters had studied the land snails from Hispaniola in the last few decades, having published quite a few of his findings in The Nautilus. Dr. Watters, who was a frequent collaborator and supporter of the National Shell Museum, passed away in October from complications of digestive cancer. The photo shows a paratype (one of the samples examined by Dr. Watters and mentioned in the article), now deposited in our Museum collection.
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