----- Original Message -----
From: G Thomas Watters <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, October 03, 1999 5:09 PM
Subject: Re: molluscan families and sub-families


> >>To all interested in records. It would be interesting to know how many
> >>molluscan Families and sub-families actually embrace a single genus or
> >>even, a single species.
> >>
>
> Campanilidae has only Campanile symboliticum Iredale, 1917.
> And didn't Globularia fluctuata (Sowerby, 1825) get kicked out of
Naticidae
> into its own family?
>
> G. Thomas Watters
> Ohio Biological Survey &
> Aquatic Ecology Laboratory

Looking for something to do besides actually work, or transfer/clean up
files from computer to computer, I will jump at anything! Including
Campanile symbolicum Iredale, 1917...which has always been a shell that
fascinated me.  Tom's mention of this big white shell sent me digging to
find out if it was just some sort of anomaly or part of a more respectably
sized but mostly extinct group.

I have a book called _Living Fossils_ edited by Niles Eldredge and Steven M.
Stanley (Springer Verlag, 1984) containing an article on the creatures by
Richard S. Houbrick. (Dr. Houbrick also did a 1981 paper on the species in
Malacologia (21(1-2):263-289 and several later works, and is equally learned
on the ceriths.).  This article answers all those sorts of questions that we
collectors have about shells...for instance, did you know that one of its
unusual characteristics is a calcified periostracum (also known in the
epitoniids and rissoids.)

Dr. Houbrick also makes it plain that the Family Campanilidae wasn't always
this lonely a taxonomic home! "During the Early Tertiary, prosobranch
gastropods of the family Campanilidae Douville, 1904 comprised an extensive
group of many large-shelled species that were common in the Tethys Sea."
The Eocene Paris Basin fauna has a lot of them...(they got all the best
stuff...like those big horned cowries, and that is probably where we should
be looking for the fossil record of the winged pigs as well!) ....) A rather
large shell itself, reaching 244 mm in length, it once had a huge cousin, C.
giganteum (Lamarck, 1804) (type species of the genus Campanile) which grew
up to a meter long!  One of the largest gastropods on record, says Houbrick.
Some 40 other species are known in the fossil record. There was even a New
World genus, Dirocerithium Woodring and Stenzel, 1959. The cause of the near
extinction of the group around the beginning of the Pleistocene is not
known, but it is speculated by Houbrick that the rise of the Strombidae  may
have been a factor. Campanilids are shallow water herbivores occupying the
same niche that the conchs apparently wanted for their own, and the
strombids began eating all the good stuff. Nature red in tooth and claw
again!

The article also explains that the family Campanilidae has but a single
genus and species, C. symbolicum, from SW Australia. Houbrick comments that
it is frequently assigned to the Cerithiidae and that it is assuredly a
member of the superfamily Cerithiacea (-oidea), along with Cerithiidae and
Potamididae).

However, in _Mollusca: The Southern Synthesis_  (Beesley, P.L., Ross, G.J.B.
& Wells, A., 1998) there is a more current pair of articles on the ceriths
and the campanilids by John M. Healey and Fred E. Wells which takes into
account Houbrick's 1981 research and some later studies he and others
(Healy, Haszprunar, and Ponder and Waren) did that says it is not a
cerithioidean. Though the campanilids living and dead are distinctly related
to the Cerithoidea, they branched from the ceriths so long ago that the big
guys actually get their own superfamily, Campaniloidea (-acea) (Haszprunar,
1988) and Haszprunar has even proposed a new suborder for the family,
Campanilimorpha. This would be placed between the Caenogastropoda and the
Heterobranchia. Wow!  All this for one big chalky white shell?

Well, no, Houbrick also did a lot of work on the small (in both shell size
and number of species) Indo-Pacific family Plesiotrochidae in 1990. The
taxonomic powers (Healy, in this case) decreed that it share the superfamily
Campaniloidea with the Campanilidae. The Pleistotrochidae is a small family,
with "about a dozen nominal species" all of them way under 20 mm.  You can
see line drawings of a few of the conical, vaguely cerith-looking shells and
a close-up face view of an animal in Barry Wilson's _Australian Marine
Shells_,  and there's a fine drawing of a 3mm species from New South Wales,
Plesiotrochus pagodiformis Hedley, 1907 in Patty Jansen's 1995 _Seashells of
New South Wales_. And there's also much more in _The Southern Synthesis_.
Soooo, it is a two family superfamily, from the itsy-bitsy to the solitary
whopper.

There is a little more about the Campanilidae in Gary Rosenberg's
Encyclopedia of Shells.

For more about campanilids or bibliographic information, ask. I seem to have
a lot more than I thought here.

Lynn Scheu
Louisville, KY
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