Triphora princeps G.B. Sowerby III, 1904 is a shallow-marine gastropod seashell belonging to family Triphoridae, which occurs worldwide. Most species of this family live in soft bottoms in the Indo-Pacific region between the intertidal zone to a depth of 200–500 m, with some even deeper (below 1000 m).
In some places triphorid gastropods are especially diverse. An excellent example is in the islands complex of Vanuata, in the southwest Pacific Ocean. In this region, there are at least 259 known species), and 70% of them are new to science (Albano et al., 2019).
There are numerous species of recent triphorid gastropods in most museum collections, and many of these species are undescribed and/unnamed.
Triphorid gastropods are typically small in size (commonly 2 to 10 mm in length, with only exceptionally as much as approximately 50 mm. Most have sinistral-coiled (left-hand coiled) high-spired shells (Wikipedia, 2022), like the shell illustrated below.
Triphora princeps is known from the Philippine Islands, and an example of this species is illustrated above (two views: apertural and abapertural). The largest shell of this particular species is known to be 58 mm long and 7 mm wide. The one illustrated below is close to that record size, as it is 51.7 mm long and 8.2 mm wide, but its tip is missing. Its shell is left-hand coiled (sinistrally coiled). It is safe to say that T. princeps is a "giant" among triphorids, and it is among the largest known species of this genus.
Triphora has a fossil record extending from the Late Cretaceous (Maastrichtian Stage) to Recent.
Reference:
Albano, P.G., A.J. Piet Bakker, and B. Sabelli. 2019. Annoted catalog of the types of Triphoridae (Mollusca, Gastropoda) in the Natural History Museum of the United Kingdon, London. Zoosystematics and Evolution 95(1):161–308. [a pdf is available free via the internet]
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