Winston Ponder

Who is Winston Ponder?

Winston F. Ponder B.Sc, M.Sc, Ph.D, D.Sc. is a noted malacologist from New Zealand who has named and described many marine animals, especially micromolluscs. He is a graduate of the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Ponder was the principal research scientist in the malacology section of the Australian Museum, Sydney, Australia. He helped to build up the museum's mollusc collection so that it became one of the most extensive of its kind in the world. Ponder retired from this post after a long career of more than forty years of research on molluscs, and he is now an Honorary Fellow.

He is also a managing editor of the Malacological Society of Australasia, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, and the South Australian Museum in Adelaide. He has been the president of the Society of Australian Systematic Biologists, and he is the managing editor of the journal Molluscan Research.

Early in his career, in 1964, he worked on Antarctic collections together with Richard Dell and Alan Beu, resulting in a major monograph on the Antarctic bivalves, chitons and scaphopods.

Ponder is the author of more than 100 research publications. Many of these are on the subjects of the freshwater molluscs of Australia, and on invertebrate conservation. However, his major contribution was a taxonomy of the Gastropoda, which he published together with David R. Lindberg in 1997 This was the last major publication on the taxonomy of the Gastropoda that was based on the morphology of snails and slugs, and did not take into account any analysis of their DNA or RNA.