A heavy, squared-off cowrie patterned with a network of fine brown lines over white, and - the mark that settles it - a dark brown underside where most local cowries are pale. Up to 8 cm (3.1 in), and built noticeably thicker than the reef-flat species.
This is a western 🌊 Indian Ocean animal that reaches from these reefs to 🇵🇰 Pakistan and no further, so it is one of the cowries a diver here can find and a diver in the Pacific cannot. It stays in crevices and under coral by day and grazes at night, and like the other large species it has been thinned by collecting wherever people can reach.
Schilder described it in 1930, in the middle of a decades-long effort to sort the family out; cowries have been split, lumped and renamed more than almost any other group of shells, which is why an old shell book and a current database can disagree completely about what to call the animal in your hand.
- heavy shell with a network of fine brown lines over white
- dark brown base, unlike the pale undersides of most local cowries
- margins thickened and squared off
- shell to 8 cm
