Eocene Mollusca from the vicinity of McCulloch's Bridge, Waihao River, South Canterbury, New Zealand: Palaeoecology and systematic.

This is another thorough study by Phillip Maxwell of a New Zealand Tertiary fauna. It is based on his Ph.D. dissertation and it is a loss to New Zealand palaeontology that Phillip was made redundant before this work was published. The scope of the monograph is the 250 species of Mollusca from the Middle to Late Eocene Waihao Greensand and Ashley Mudstone exposed in the Waihao River, on South Island. Nine new genus group taxa are proposed for gastropods and 89 new species of Mollusca are very adequately described.

The standards of writing, typography, and photography are as usual very high but, as with other publications in this series, it is not easy to find one's way from plate to text.

Comparisons are made with other New Zealand faunas of roughly comparable age but, a minor point, there is no considered overall comparison with mid-shelf faunas of similar age outside New Zealand, though extra-territorial distributions are mentioned at various places in the text.

In some families, particularly the Turridae, where a species can be highly variable, there has been extensive and necessary species-level synonymising. A minor comment is that on page 150 it is stated that Orthoswcula beui is the only record of Orthosurcula outside the Palaeogene of the United States. A European Miocene fossil with the specific name of steinvorthi Von Koenen, 1872 was ascribed to Orthoswcula byjanssen (1984, Mollusken uit het Mioceen van Winterswijk-Miste: 271).

This very professional publication is thoroughly recommended to all interested in Tertiary Mollusca and to students of New Zealand Mollusca in general.