Notes on the Fauna of the Chipola Formation- X on the Occurrence of the Volutid Subgenus Enaeta

Abstract

During the course of recent work on the Chipola Mitridae, I came across a group of shells in the Tulane University Geology Department collection that seemed out of place in this family. Upon further study, I determined that the species had first been described by Maury as a Caricella (Family Volutidae). Dall later described the same species as a Strigatella (Family Mitridae), and Gardner, although correctly synonymizing the Dall species with that of Maury, failed to note the discrepancies between the shell's characters and the characters of the named genus, thus erroneously retaining the species in the mitrid genus Strigatella. The type species of Strigatella is the Indo-Pacific (Recent) Strigatella paupercula (Linne, 1758); a typical specimen is illustrated at Plate 1, figure 6. Modern workers (Cernohorsky, 1970; Coan, et al., in press.) treat Strigatella as a subgenus of Mitra, no longer as a distinct genus.