Not sure if this has been mentioned in the past week or so,  but the
scope and variety of online identification resources for shells of all
kinds, has been growing exponentially in the past few years: a bit of
Googling, including phrases in "" marks (as in   "marine mollusc"
Micronesia     which would instigate a search for the phrase  marine
molluscs   as well as the individual word Micronesia),  can turn up a
wealth of resources, usually of fairly high reliability.    Most of the
major dealers have galleries on their sites, some of them QUITE
excellent,  and there are **huge** assemblages of online photos such as
Eddy Hardy's gastropods.com and Guido Poppe's "Cyberconchology" sites,
as well as family-specific things such as the "Iluustrated checklist of
recent Conidae" which Paul Kersten and i are in the final stages (ETA a
week or so) of producing a "first edition" of (as opposed to the "rough
draft" version we hung out for comments earlier....), and many of the
smaller families and interesting genera can be found gathered together
in one place on various websites.

When it comes to hard-copy books on Conidae,  Alan Kohn AND a couple of
others are independantly working on Carribean Conidae books currently,
and there was a splendid book just published recently on West African
Conidae, which includes the best overview so far of those wonderfully
diverse Cape Verde beasties: MONTEIRO, A., TENORIO, M. J. & POPPE, G.
T., 2004. The Family Conidae. The West African and Mediterranean species
of Conus.

An "Errata" for the Compendium exists, but i don't know where one can
obtain it: any info, Conchlers?  Apparently there were enough errors in
this "indispendible" work to make compiling such a list a useful venture.

 From a delightful late summer's night in New Scotland,
Ross Mayhew.

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