For decades, beach comber and naturalist Trevor John Smith wandered Adelaide’s metropolitan beaches collecting seashells.
Each one he meticulously categorised, recording the species, which beach, and when they were collected.
By the time of his death, the collection had thousands of shells, providing a valuable snapshot of the city’s coastal marine environment between 1955 and 1985.
Since being entrusted to the South Australian Museum by Trevor’s family in 2021, the shells were re-bagged and new labels attached –but with the Grassroots Grant from Green Adelaide, will finally be catalogued and digitised.
The digitisation process – typing in each shell’s tag by hand– is expected to take a year.
The data will then be uploaded to the Atlas of Living Australia — making it publicly accessible for research, conservation, and community use.
It is hoped the data will reveal how Adelaide’s costal biodiversity has changed over 70 years, filling knowledge gaps that modern surveys alone can’t close.
“Trevor had so many shells,” said Dr Andrea Crowther (pictured top right), who is Senior Collection Manager for Marine Invertebrates with the South Australian Museum. “He went to the beach every day.
“Once the shells are digitised, they make the story of shell communities of our beaches over time available to the public. It will also be a great resource for scientific research.
“We’ll just know which species were found on which beaches at certain times.”
The Museum’s Marine Invertebrate collection currently includes 100 cabinets full of shells, most of which are uncatalogued, simply because of the amount of work needed to do it, showing how important the Green Adelaide grant is.
The Museum has to carefully consider each donation request, but decided to accept Trevor’s shell collection, because he had done such a fine job recording the data.
Shirley Sorokin (pictured top left), who is also a Collection Manager for Marine Invertebrates at the Museum, said the Green Adelaide grant was crucial to doing the cataloging.
She said the grants were usually given to contemporary projects, but in this case the survey had already been done some time ago, and cataloging was the primary task.
“We’re collections managers, so our job is to make sure the shells are cared for, documented and available” she said. “Going forward that data can be picked up by researchers who may find: ‘oh, that shell was here in the 1950sbut isn’t anymore’.”
Andrea said the project breathes new life into a significant, yet hidden, part of the Museum’s collection, and demonstrates how historical collections like Trevor’s can power new discoveries.
“The fact that this is an historical collection with good data makes them scientifically useful,” she said.
“They’re not just pretty shells.”
