MolluscaBase – World Register of Marine Species goes fossil

MolluscaBase, which will be a Global Species Database covering all marine, freshwater and terrestrial molluscs, recent and fossil, was launched on February 6-7, 2014 at the Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ) at Ostende, host institute of the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS). Currently, the WoRMS database contains more than 44,000 valid, verified species names of Recent marine Mollusca, which are estimated to represent approximately 95% of all valid species. Beyond catching up with the missing 5%, and keeping up with the yearly established new species, the molluscan component of WoRMS shall be expanded to contain freshwater and terrestrial Mollusca, estimated on ca 28,000 valid species. Adding the aspect of time to the current database, and acknowledging the fossil record as the source of extant diversity, it has been agreed that the list should be extended to include all fossil mollusc taxa. A solid estimate of the number of fossil mollusc species is not available yet. MolluscaBase is a strictly taxonomic database, relying only on published sources. As such, it does not compete with occurrence-based initiatives, like, e.g., the Paleobiology Database, but rather supplements these platforms. WoRMS as a whole has had more than 1,000,000 unique visitors in 2013, and has currently almost 1,500 citations in Google Scholar. Moreover, it is linked to various biodiversity initiatives and repositories and is thus an important component of global biodiversity infrastructure, providing quality control and taxonomic backbone. Going fossil, the existing network shall be extended to link with global, regional or taxon-specific palaeontological databases. The fossil component of MolluscaBase is still in its starting phase, and needs your support! Data input in MolluscaBase is performed by a limited number of taxonomic editors and various corresponding contributors, who may provide datasets to the database management team. If you are a taxonomist, specializing in any group of fossil molluscs, and want to become a contributor to MolluscaBase, let us know! If you are holding your own database and want to join or link it to MolluscaBase, let us know! Please contact the WoRMS team at [email protected], or the corresponding author, to find your role in MolluscaBase!