Cone snail
family of molluscs
Cone snails, or cones, are highly venomous sea snails that constitute the family Conidae. Conidae is a taxonomic family (previously subfamily) of predatory marine gastropod molluscs in the superfamily Conoidea.
As of 2014, cone snails are the only member of the superfamily Conoidea. Some previous classifications grouped the cone snails in a subfamily, Coninae. As of March 2015 Conidae contained over 800 recognized species, varying widely in size from lengths of 1.3 cm to 21.6 cm. Working in 18th-century Europe, Carl Linnaeus knew of only 30 species that are still considered valid.
Fossils of cone snails have been found from the Eocene to the Holocene epochs. Cone snail species have shells that are roughly conical in shape. Many species have colorful patterning on the shell surface. Cone snails are almost exclusively tropical in distribution.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cone snail” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.