Mussel of the Month

Sundadontina is a new genus that continues the recent history of revision of the old genus Pseudodon. We have discussed this multiple times previously when we talked about some of the other new genera like Monodontina and Bineurus. If you look back to the post we made in July 2018 for Pseudodon there is a nice little summary table from the time that now serves to show how fast things have changed since then.

The ulterior motive for this post is to plug our updated global checklist of freshwater mussels. Our latest paper (Graf & Cummings, 2021), “A ‘big data’ approach to global freshwater mussel diversity (Bivalvia: Unionoida), with an updated checklist of genera and species” officially comes out March 2021 in the Journal of Molluscan Studies, vol. 87(1). As a review paper, it is published as open access online and has been available since February. Our previous checklist (Graf & Cummings, 2007) is one of the most cited papers in JMS (according to their web site), and we hope that this new article will be of the same utility.

Fortunately, we were able to catch those latest 2020 revisions, including Sundadontina cumingii, before the manuscript went to press! As ever, as new revisions hit the streets, we will continue to update the MUSSEL Project Database!