Charlie and all,
 
I'm vague on this, but wasn't there some tale of a boat load of Cypraea
moneta or annulus being shipwrecked off the coast of England in the North
Sea. And for years afterwards (maybe even up to today?) beachwalkers would
find these exotics on their beaches from time to time?  Also on opposite
beaches on the continent?
 
However, I am not suggesting that this is what happened with Charlie's
stray exotics in Florida.  For one thing, it has been my experience that,
no matter how closely you question a non-sheller about where he got a
shell, if he has been to Florida, he "found" it there.  When I was a child,
an aunt visited Florida for an entire winter and shipped back boxes of
shells to the children of the family for us to paw through and dream over.
 There were boxes of carefully laid-and-dried-flat coquinas in all the
color range of that species.  There were queen conchs, angel wings, little
Florida cones and Cypraea spurca acicularis, and  land shells, especially
Euglandina and "Peanut" cerions.  And more I can't remember. But there were
also tiger cowries, and those Cuban liguus so well known in shell shops,
and there were the usual babylonias and Indo-Pacific trochids, mixed in
with cockles and venus clamthat arrived avowed that she found them all down
there in the land of Orange juice and  Ross Allen's reptiles. Sure she did.
Just not on the beach. I think people get these things in gift shops, or
someone hands them to them, and they put them aside, then  in a fit of
tidiness, they merge all their "found" shells into a single box. Locality
being unimportant to them, they remember only "Florida" or "Key Biscayne,"
or "Fort de Soto,"  the place they spent the most time beachcombing.
 
However, in the "News of the Wierd" Category, one year I found a grotty old
red thorny oyster valve down on the beach at the Seven Mile bridge at that
campground that has been there for years. Long Key State Park, I think.
Anyway, it was S. ictericus, I think, if memory serves.  Not important.
What is important is that a few YEARS later, I found its matching valve on
Little Duck Key!   Grotty and red also.  And without doubt its other half!
I didn't realize this until I got the thing home and while trying to figure
out what it was, remembered the other red valve and dragged it out.
Imagine my surprise when I idly tried them together.  (Yeah, I know,
Charlie, off the topic.)
 
Lynn Scheu
Louisville, KY