Conchology

The study and hobby collection of mollusc shells, its name drawn from Ancient Greek words for cockle and study, distinguishing it from malacology, which examines the whole living animal rather than the shell alone; the field covers terrestrial, freshwater and marine shells as well as the hardened plates called opercula that some snails use to seal their shells. People have gathered shells for millennia, with Stone Age communities trading oceanic shells far inland, but the scientific study of shells developed during the Renaissance, when collectors assembled them in curiosity cabinets; the Jesuit priest Filippo Bonanni published the first dedicated scholarly work on shells in 1681, Martin Lister followed in 1692 with a text illustrated by more than a thousand engravings, and George Rumpf devised the first real classification of molluscs in the late seventeenth century, later refined by Carl Linnaeus, while Emanuel Mendes da Costa coined the English word conchology itself in the 1770s. A conchologist is distinguished from a casual shell collector mainly by scientific intent rather than aesthetic interest, and today's researchers often study shells already held in institutional collections rather than gathering their own.