Conidae Fleming, 1822

Sacchetti, Claudia, Landau, Bernard & Ávila, Sérgio P., 2023, The Lower Pliocene marine gastropods of Santa Maria Island, Azores: Taxonomy and palaeobiogeographic implications, Zootaxa 5295 (1), pp. 1-150 : 81

Family Conidae Fleming, 1822

Note. The presence of conoidean gastropods in the Santa Maria assemblages was already noted by Bronn in Hartung (1861: 117), who recorded Conus ? pyrula Brocchi , without stating the exact locality. Bronn in Reiss (1862: 23-24) listed three species: C. canditatus Bronn in Mayer, C. trochulus Reeve , and C.? pyrula , the first two from Pinheiros. Mayer (1864: 76-80) re-listed C. candidatus , erected a new species C. trochilus Mayer, 1864 , for Bronn’s record C. trochulus in Bronn in Reiss (1862), and referred to the C.? pyrula reference of early authors as Conus species indeterminata.

In the material at hand, we recognized five species. The species herein determined as Lautoconus cf. anomalomamillus ( Sacco, 1893) might be the same as the C.? pyrula recorded by previous authors, the other ( Conus sl. sp. A) has not been recorded before. Although the following determinations are rather speculative and based on poor and incomplete material, conid diversity is important in the Pliocene of Europe as high diversity is characteristic of tropical MPPMU1.

The relative merits of using one genus or many for cones was discussed at length by Harzauser & Landau (2016: 35). In this paper, we follow those authors and Tucker & Tenorio (2009) in using the subgenera at full genus rank.