446 



Note on HARPA (EOCITHARA) punctata, Verco. 



Harpa punctata, Verco, Trans. Roy. Soc, S.A., 1896. vol. xx.^ 

 p. 218. Type locality —0& Newland Head in 20 fathoms. 



During the past seventeen years three more examples of 

 this shell have been taken — one at Normanville, in the 

 possession of Mr. Kimber ; one by Mr. Saunders at American 

 River, Kangaroo Island ; and one by Master Francis Arnold 

 at St. Francis Island. The first two are somewhat broken, 

 but the last is a beautiful specimen of a yellowish-salmon 

 tint, with obscure lighter clouded bands as in the type, but 

 not showing its crescentic dark blotches, and numerous 

 punctations. 



The original specimens measured 32 mm. in length by 

 21 mm. in greatest width, and 33 mm. by 22 mm. The St. 

 Francis Island example measures 34 mm. by 24 mm., so that 

 it is the largest example known. All these are mature, as 

 evidenced by the ascent of the suture at the aperture as in 

 the genus Scaphc/la. 



It was classed when described as a Hrupa, but now it is 

 placed in Eocifhara, a section of that genus created by Fischer 

 in 1883 for the reception of Eocene fossils. Cossmann, in his 

 Paleoconchologie Comparee, gives the differential characters 

 of the section, viz., ''the columellar border forms a thin, 

 rather wide callosity, which does not spread over the base, nor 

 over the spire whorls, and is bounded outside by a quite 

 distinct margin. This border, too, is detached anteriorly, and 

 forms an umbilical cleft more or less deep instead of spreading 

 itself over the basal pad. Then the siphonal notch is narrower 

 and more deeply cut into this pad, so that when the shell is 

 viewed from the dorsum, the notch forms nearly a semicircle. 

 Finally the riblets are more completely folded upon the suture, 

 and cover it, joining one another; though this last character 

 is less visible in the South Australian Eocithara, which have 

 besides a more globular protoconch." 



These characters are found in Harpa punctata, which 

 has, besides, well marked, the two special features of the 

 South Australian fossil examples of Eocithara, viz., the 

 globular protoconch, and the failure of the costules to join 

 one another by folding themselves along the suture. 



Professor Tate, in the Transactions of the Royal Society 

 of South Australia, 1888, vol. xi., p. 149, in a paper on "The 

 Gastropods of the Older Tertiary of Australia," describes eight 

 species of Harpa, and in Proceedings Royal Society, N.S. 

 Wales, 1893, vol. xxvii., p. 173, a ninth species. By the 



