Dear Mr. Herbert:
        Thanks for the logical, useful insights.  Personally, i like the
approach of Anders Warren, who places most of the group in the genus
Trophon, citing extreme variability, and overlapping charactaristics of
the many  confusing genera in use now.
 
                                                                                                                -Ross M.
> Ross,
>
> The Trophoninae are so unstable for three reasons: 1) convergence in shell
> morphology with other muricids, 2) many species come from cold, deep
> waters where they are just not accessible, 3) there is no fossil record
> for us to follow the evolution of the group (Trophon shells are not
> preserved b/c they live in rocky intertidal habitats or very deep water)
> Without the soft anatomy for comparison to other groups, and with unstable
> shell characters and an unknown evolutionary history, little can be done
> with the Trophoninae at present.
>
> Two more reasons that deal with our collecting biases:
> Believe or not, but most museum collections of muricids are composed of
> dry lots donated by private individuals.  These people collect during
> vacations usually, and their idea of a fun time is usually not the Arctic.
> So we have tons of material from tropical and sub-tropical waters and much
> less from temperate and cooler waters.
 
> The convergence problem is so bad in the Trophoninae that the type genus
> is actually more closely related to Ocenebrine genera, such as Nucella and
> my favorite, Eupleura, than it is to other Trophonine genera such as
> Boreotrophon.  If anyone does get around to studying the group, I imagine
> there won't be a Trophoninae, and the genera that currently comprise the
> group will be placed in a number of different subfamilies.
>
> Greg Herbert
>
>
>
> > "unstable"!  The subfamily Trophoninae and the Polinices/Lunatia crowd
> > are two of the most problematic, for some reason (any theories??).  The