Turrid

Turrid, plural turrids, is a common name for a very large group of predatory sea snails, marine gastropod mollusks which until recently were all classified in the family Turridae. However, recently the family was discovered to be polyphyletic and therefore was split into a number of families.

The original family Turridae used to contain more than 4,000 species. the Turridae (sensu Powell 1966) It was the largest mollusk family and the largest group of marine caenogastropods. There were approximately 27,000 described scientific names (accepted names plus synonyms) within the family Turridae. Turrids constituted more than half of the predatory species of gastropods in some parts of the world (Taylor et al. 1980). However, this very large family was shown to be polyphyletic, and in 2011 it was divided into 13 separate families by Bouchet, Kantor, Sysoev and Puilandre.

The single most complete collection of turrids in museums worldwide is in the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia malacology collection; this is because of specialized collecting by the American malacologist Virginia Orr Maes (1920-1986).

Turrids are found worldwide in every sea and ocean from both poles to the tropics. They occur from the low-intertidal zone to depths of more than eight thousand metres (e.g., Xanthodaphne levis Sysoev, 1988, collected between 7974–8006 m, in the Bougainville Trench). However, most species of turrids are found in the neritic zone.

Most turrids are rather small, with a height under 2 cm, but the adult shells of different species are between 0.3 and 11.4 cm in height.

The shape of the shells is more or less , varying from very high-spired to broadly ovate. The whorls are elongate to broadly conical.

...
Wikipedia