Lifting the veil from a historical collection of birds from Burundi kept at the Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali of Turin (Italy)

In 1999 the Museo Regionale di Scienze Naturali in Turin (MRSN) acquired a collection of 248 birds, nearly all from Burundi, which had remained unstudied until then. The specimens had been collected by Savino Bozzelli, an Italian student at Bujumbura University, between November 1967 and November 1968. Regrettably, no further biographical information has been found on Bozzelli. Therefore, no details are available as to how his collection ended up in Turin. The only established fact is that as early as 1967, his first year at university, Bozzelli started sending bird skins on a regular basis to the Central African Museum in Tervuren (Belgium); the collection held at the MRSN is, therefore, quite likely just a portion of the original one. Revision work on the collection led to the identification of as many as 95 taxa, belonging to 44 families. Therefore, whilst the unknown ways in which the collection came to Turin jeopardized its historical relevance, its scientific value has remained undiminished, both because the collection represents a snapshot of Burundi’s biodiversity over the time span 1967-1968 and the comparison with the GBIF datasets yields additional data about Burundian bird specimens preserved in natural history museums.