Curator’s Choice: Stillman Berry’s First Shell

This specimen of a marlinspike shell (Terebra maculata) has sentimental and historic significance, which makes it a favorite of Associate Curator Vanessa Delnavaz, MA. The shell comes with a label handwritten by S. Stillman Berry: “This poor battered shell is kept for reasons of sentiment. It has been in our family at least 110 years… My father, Ralph Berry (b. 1850) played with it when he was a baby, and I (b. 1887) when I was a baby.” The shell nurtured “a life-long attachment to such objects” that led Berry to collect many thousands of shells. In 1985, Berry’s collection was donated to Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History and helped to put the Department of Invertebrate Zoology here on the map as a specialized mollusk collection.