Lobatus Gigas - Taxonomy and Naming

Taxonomy and Naming

The queen conch was originally described from a shell in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist and taxonomist Carl Linnaeus in his Systema Naturae. Linnaeus named the species Strombus gigas, and that remained the accepted name for over 200 years. Linnaeus did not mention a specific locality for this species in his description, giving only "America" as the type locality. The specific name is the ancient Greek word gigas (γίγας), which means "giant", referring to the large size of this snail compared with almost all other gastropod molluscs. Strombus lucifer, which was considered to be a synonym much later, was also described by Linnaeus in Systema Naturae.

In the first half of the 20th century, the type material for the species was thought to have been lost; in other words, the shell on which Linnaeus based his original description and which would very likely have been in his own collection, was apparently missing; not having the type material to formally define the species created a problem for taxonomists. To remedy this, in 1941 a neotype of this species was designated by the American malacologists William J. Clench and R. Tucker Abbott. In this case, the neotype was not an actual shell or whole specimen, but a figure from a book published in the 17th century, 23 years before Linnaeus was even born, the 1684 Recreatio mentis, et occuli by the Italian scholar Filippo Buonanni. This was the first book published that was solely about seashells. In 1953, though, the Swedish malacologist Nils Hjalmar Odhner searched the Linnaean Collection at Uppsala University and discovered the original shell upon which Linnaeus had based his description, thereby invalidating Clench and Abbott's neotype designation.

The family Strombidae has recently undergone an extensive taxonomic revision, and a few subgenera, including Eustrombus, were elevated to genus level by some authors. Petuch (2004) and Petuch and Roberts (2007) recombined this species as Eustrombus gigas, and Landau et al. (2008) recombined it as Lobatus gigas.