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Assorted shell
The matter of working with the mollusca takes a great deal of teamwork to get the job done. This teamwork can, perhaps, be
divided into three categories: one, the field worker who collects the material, whether through diving, dredging, shore
collecting or other methods; two, the plodder who works in the literature, digging out the answers to synonymy and priority
and identification; and three, the trained scientist who is able, through his background and education, to make use of the
help of the other two kinds of workers and combine their work into a meaningful whole.
No matter what your own favorite category may be, the literature is the necessary recorded story of the family. The fact that
it may be somewhat tangled at the moment only adds to the challenge and interest for the worker in that category; the
literature is the tool by which the Cypraea, for example, may be known. Because of this I'd like to mention a few examples
that have been especially helpful to me and to others working with this group.
The early records of Cypraeidae extend back beyond the 17th century, but I shall use Nicolai Gaultieri's Index Testarum
Conchyliorum of 1742 as my starting point. He called the cowries Porcellana, and employed a polynomial system for his species
designations which amounted to practically a whole sentence for each name. I would guess that Gualtieri was our first Lumper
-- he figured an outlandish number of varieties for each species, but for the most part his figures are recognizable today,
and he featured some forty species on four plates.
The next major work signaled the end of an epoch not only for Cypraea, but for conchology in general. In 1757, d'Argenville
produced an important work with more accurately drawn woodcut engravings, adding in many instances also the drawings of the
anatomy of the animal, as well as including some fossil species. Unfortunately for us, d'Argenville limited his coverage of
Cypraea to only one plate of illustrations.
The species was established by Duclos in 1833 (Mag. de Zool., Mollusqu., Paris), and illustrated on page 26. Monographers of
the genus Cypraea, such as Reeve, Sowerby, Roberts, and Hidalgo, erroneously recorded the species from various Indo-Pacific
localities, with the "Philippine Islands" being the favourite locality quoted; Hidalgo even reported it from the "Sandwich
Islands". Most authors treated C. esontropia as a valid species, and the Schilders, in all their papers, restricted the
distribution of the species to Mauritius.
Doubt about the species taxonomic status and distributional range, was raised by Dr. Verdcourt in his monograph on East
African Cowries (Journ. E. Afr. Nat. Hist. Soc., 23(7):282), who suggested that C. esontropia may be no more than a variety
of C. cribraria Linnaeus. A specimen of C. cribraria, with small, pale wine-coloured spots on the labial margin, collected by
Penn at Shanzu, Kenya, was thought to be C. esontropia by Mr. W. Old, Jr. (in Verdcourt).
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