Description
The size of the shell attains 13 mm.
(Original description) Shell.—The high, narrow shell has a biconical shape with a tall blunt spire, a slightly impressed suture, and a shortish base. The whorls are feebly ribbed and very obsoletely spiralled.
A spire is a part of the coiled shell of molluscs. The spire consists of all of the whorls except for the body whorl. Each spire whorl represents a rotation of 360°. A spire is part of the shell of a snail, a gastropod mollusc, a gastropod shell, and also the whorls of the shell in ammonites, which are fossil shelled cephalopods.
In anatomy, a suture is a fairly rigid joint between two or more hard elements of an organism, with or without significant overlap of the elements.
A whorl is a single, complete 360° revolution or turn in the spiral growth of a mollusc shell. A spiral configuration of the shell is found in of numerous gastropods, but it is also found in shelled cephalopods including Nautilus, Spirula and the large extinct subclass of cephalopods known as the ammonites.
Sculpture : there are on the earlier whorls about 12, on the last two whorls about 14 elongated tubercles, which project bluntly and slightly above the middle of the whorls, and are obliquely and feebly produced to the inferior suture. They are obsolete on the base. The surface is closely scratched with fine, somewhat unequal lines of growth.
Sculpture is a feature of many of the shells of mollusks. It is three-dimensional ornamentation on the outer surface of the shell, as distinct from either the basic shape of the shell itself or the pattern of colouration, if any. Sculpture is a feature found in the shells of gastropods, bivalves, and scaphopods. The word "sculpture" is also applied to surface features of the aptychus of ammonites, and to the outer surface of some calcareous opercula of marine gastropods such as some species in the family Trochidae.
Spirals—there is a very slight pad which forms an inferior margin to the suture. Below this is a hardly concave furrow, on the lower side of which the whorls are angulated by the projection of the tubercles. The lower part of the whorls is very obsoletely marked with broad flat spiral threads, which may be traced to the tip of the snout.
Colour: pale waxy white, whence the name.
The spire is conical, with profile-lines interrupted by the prominence of the keel, from which both above and below is a contraction into the suture. The apex consists of 2 tumid rounded whorls of nearly equal size, with a very slight suture. There are 8 whorls in all, of slow and regular increase.The body whorl is small, with a rounded conical base and a smallish snout. The whorls are angularly convex, with a slight contraction into the suture, both at top and bottom of the whorls. The suture is a little impressed, rather oblique. The aperture is small and narrow, pear-shaped, scarcely angulated above, and drawn out into a rather narrow siphonal canal in front. The outer lip is regularly curved above and flat in front; the edge retires slightly below the suture, so as to form the deep rather narrow sinus, whose lower side is made by the very high and prominent shoulder, which advances very far forward, and still continues to do so though more slightly on to the edge of the canal, where it again retires to the left. The inner lip has a thin glaze on the body and columella whose union is very slightly concave. The generic fold is a prominent, rounded, narrow thread which coils round the columella about the middle and parallel to the suture. The front of the columella is narrow, twisted, and oblique. [2]
In anatomy, an apex is part of the shell of a mollusk. The apex is the pointed tip of the shell of a gastropod, scaphopod, or cephalopod.
The body whorl is part of the morphology of the shell in those gastropod mollusks that possess a coiled shell. The term is also sometimes used in a similar way to describe the shell of a cephalopod mollusk.
The aperture is an opening in certain kinds of mollusc shells: it is the main opening of the shell, where the head-foot part of the body of the animal emerges for locomotion, feeding, etc.
This page is based on this
Wikipedia article Text is available under the
CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
