Recently, Roosen, Callea & Schilthuizen (2026, Deinsea vol. 24) fixed a lectotype for the grove snail, Cepaea nemoralis (Linnaeus, 1758), based on a specimen from the Niccolò Gualtieri collection. However, we show that the single surviving shell in that collection does not correspond to the specimen referred to by Linnaeus, it is therefore not a syntype of Helix nemoralis, and consequently cannot serve as lectotype. Apart from that, the shell of Gualtieri belongs to the Apennine subspecies Cepaea nemoralis lucifuga (Menke, 1828). In order to protect the name of the nominate subspecies we here select as lectotype a shell that once belonged to the Museum Ludoviciae Ulricae, now part of the Linnean collection curated in the Uppsala University Museum of Evolution.
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Bank et al. (2026) studied this question.
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