Places where we went wrong when writing "A Guide to Worldwide Cowries" are well known, they have been comprehensively discussed and were forefingered at from various directions, with different attitudes. We managed to revise most of them in the second edition. There are a few things, however, that Alex and I could not dwell upon, mainly due to lack of time, but in other cases, lack of material. It is a problem that I have not been able to solve that dealers and collectors are more likely to shout at us offhand before coming up with well founded proofs for their criticism. Whenever proof was given, both, Alex and me, were the first to admit our mistakes. One of these issues was our evaluation of the taxon kingae. We had no specimen at hand and noone seemed to have a true specimen. We arrived at the conclusion that kingae was a synonym of bernardi, perhaps a calloused variant. At some point, I would admit that the true kingae was so convincingly different that it should be separated at least as a subspecies. That was when I saw a specimen from coll. Chiapponi. In the meantime, I was able to measure and compare a larger number of shells of "kingae" from different localities. The initial idea that it is a variety of bernardi proved correct. A detailed study is in preparaton and will be published shortly*.


On left: E. bernardi bernardi, Tahiti. Right: E. bernardi var. kingae, Pitcairn.