''Bourciera'' is a
genus
Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial nom ...
of
neotropical
The Neotropical realm is one of the eight biogeographic realms constituting Earth's land surface. Physically, it includes the tropical terrestrial ecoregions of the Americas and the entire South American temperate zone.
Definition
In bioge ...
terrestrial
Terrestrial refers to things related to land or the planet Earth.
Terrestrial may also refer to:
* Terrestrial animal, an animal that lives on land opposed to living in water, or sometimes an animal that lives on or near the ground, as opposed to ...
gastropod mollusk
Mollusca is the second-largest phylum of invertebrate animals after the Arthropoda, the members of which are known as molluscs or mollusks (). Around 85,000 extant species of molluscs are recognized. The number of fossil species is e ...
s or
land snails in the family
Helicinidae
Helicinidae is a family of small tropical land snails which have an operculum. They are terrestrial operculate gastropod mollusks in the superfamily Helicinoidea.
These snails are not at all closely related to the air-breathing land snails, d ...
. All species in the genus have an
operculum.
In 1907, an attempt was made to rename the genus ''Pseudhelicina'', sometimes corrected to ''Pseudohelicina,'' on the basis of the fact that ''Bourciera'' was also the name of a genus of birds, but according to MolluscaBase this replacement was unnecessary and ''Bourciera'' is still used. H. Burrington Baker considered ''Bourciera'' among the most primitive of terrestrial mollusks.
Distribution
The genus was initially described from Ecuador based on specimens collected by
Jules Bourcier
Claude Marie Jules Bourcier (19 February 1797 – 9 March 1873) was a French naturalist and expert on hummingbirds.[Prosopo ...]
, after whom it was named. It is also known to occur in Peru.
Species
Species within the genus ''Bourciera'' include:
* ''
Bourciera fraseri''
Pfeiffer 1859
* ''
Bourciera helicinaeformis''
Pfeiffer 1853
* ''
Bourciera striatula''
Miller 1879
* ''
Bourciera viridissima''
Miller 1879[Miller, Konrad (1879). Die Binnenmollusken von Ecuador. ''Malakozoologische Blätter'' 26 n. s.): 117-203]
References
Helicinidae
Taxa named by Ludwig Karl Georg Pfeiffer
Gastropod genera
{{Helicinidae-stub