Learn about the collection, Dieter Cosman, and the current people working with the collection.
The Collection
The Cosman Shell Collection consists of over 117,000 shell specimens, specifically gastropod and bivalve shells, collected globally over a 60 year period by Dieter Cosman. It is currently held in a designated collection space within Dr. Joseph Schulz’s lab at Occidental College, much of it within the original drawers that Cosman used to organize his collection. Each drawer contains lots of shells organized by species and marked with when, where, and how the shells in each lot were collected; this detailed metadata makes this collection very valuable for scientific purposes. The collection has been digitized by students since its arrival at the College in 2015, thus allowing for more efficient access to and analysis of the collection. Temporally, the significant timespan of when specimens were collected leaves potential for valuable change-over-time analyses, especially considering the rapid environmental and ecological transformations much of the world has experienced in the past 60 years. Geographically, there is notably significant representation from the Hawaiian Islands and the Solomon Islands, although shells had been collected worldwide. Overall, this collection has amazing potential for many areas of science and research spanning ecology, marine biology, genetics, evolutionary studies, and more.
Dieter Cosman
Dieter Cosman, born in 1917, began collecting shells in the 1950s on family vacations on their boat Helvetia. He began mainly in the Bahamas, eventually collecting and documenting shells from the Pacific and Indian oceans on diving trips. As a collector, he was meticulous and sought to curate a complete representation of shells from the many places he visited; in addition, he marked each acquired shell with the collection date, location, depth, and retrieval method. His detail-oriented nature and wide spatial and temporal representation of shells is why this collection is so scientifically valuable and especially impressive as a resource. His passion and dedication to the collection of shell specimens will allow Occidental students and researchers to further their understanding of mollusks, the marine environment, and more for years to come.
People
Dr. Joseph Schulz – Collection Director, Biology Department Chair
