Ditlev Thaanum

Ditlev Due Thaanum (born February 11, 1867 in Aalborg , Jutland , Denmark , † October 24, 1963 in Honolulu , Hawaii ), also known as David Thaanum , was an American amateur malacologist and snail collector of Danish origin.

Live and act

At the age of nine or ten, Ditlev Thaanum was sent to a family of printers and publishers, where he finished his apprenticeship in 1886. In 1894 he set out on a planned circumnavigation. However, he got stuck in Honolulu, where he developed a keen interest in snail collecting. In 1907 he married Myrtle Kuhns. Together with his brother-in-law Daniel Kuhns, who later changed his name to Langford, he brought together collections of the land snail families Achatinellidae and Amastridae . In 1924 Thaanum took part in the Tanager expedition to the northwestern Hawaiian Islands. Much of Thaanum's collection, consisting of 4,000 paratypes of marine, land and freshwater snails, was described by Henry Augustus Pilsbry and Charles Montague Cooke and presented to the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University in 1953 . Although Thaanum worked in printing, there are no publications of his own.

Dedication names

The genus Thaanumella and 30 snail taxa , including Amastra thaanumi , Terebra thaanumi and the now extinct species Achatinella thaanumi , have been named after Ditlev Thaanum.

literature

• Richard I. Johnson: Types of land and freshwater mollusks from the Hawaiian islands in the Museum of Comparative Zoology In: Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard College . Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, Volume 155, Number 4, November 20, 1996
• Harald A Rehder: Ditlev Thaanum: 1867-1963, a Memorial Sketch. Bishop Museum Press, 1969