J. D. Taylor Ed., Centenary Symposium of the Malacological Society of London, Oxford University Press, 1996. ISBN 0 19 854980 6, i-ix, 1-392
Originally reviewed by David Long in 1996.
Published in Journal of Conchology (1996), Vol.35
This volume consists of 31 papers presented as part of the Malacological Society of London's Centenary Symposium, with the same title as the book, held from 14-16 September 1993. The authors of the various contributions are the foremost experts in all the various fields of their profession - so this, together with its broad scope, makes the book an essential addition to the library of any institution or person seriously interested in Mollusca.
The contents are divided into three parts: origin of Mollusca and evolution of the major groups (10 papers), Gastropod evolution (17 papers), and evolution ofscaphopods and bivalves (3 papers). In general the first part consists of new analyses, or fresh reviews, of already available data. This is not surprising because the papers cover so much ground that they could not be based solely on original observations. More new data is presented in the part on gastropods, less in the shortest final part. One new genus and species is described - Ribeiria junior Runnegar, 1996, early Middle Cambrian, Queensland (p. 85); the group names Eogastropoda (for Patellogastropoda plus possible ancestors) and Orthogastropoda (the rest of the gastropods) are introduced by Ponder and Lindberg (p. 145), and a revision of the systematics of the Colloniidae Cossmann, 1916 (Monaro, Conti and Szabo, pp. 200- 202), includes a proposal for a new subfamily - Adeorbisininae.
John Taylor's claim in the Preface that "the chapters in this book represent an overview of current work on molluscan relationships and evolution . . ." is amply substantiated on reading. The contributions show that old established and new methods are being used, separately and, when appropriate, in combination to approach the problem of how gradually to reduce the unknown areas in the story of the origin and radiation of the Mollusca. A particularly welcome feature of the book is the wide variety of techniques and disciplines brought to bear on the subject - cladistics, palaeontology, anatomy including ultrastructure, developmental studies, DNA, rRNA and allozyme analyses and predation all feature.
Readers should not look for unanimity of conclusions but they will always find the reasons for the conclusions which are being advanced, or else a statement of why a result is inconclusive - and where needed an explanation of the methods used. The papers giving cladistics analyses in most cases list the characters used and give character matrices; this enables those interested to come to their own conclusions.
Production standards are generally excellent. There are very few typographical errors and minor nonsenses. Where present, these appear to be due to oversights - especially where numbers or dimensions are involved. For instance, Wagner's statement (p. 162) 'This analysis includes 700 specimens representing over 350 valid species' does not seem to fit well with the statement further down the same paragraph that "Moderate degrees of intra specific variation were observed . . .", and there is a mismatch between the dimensions of 5-17 mm given for various Lepetid shell lengths (Angerer and Haszprunar, p. 173) and their earlier references to "7@10 mm thick sections" (p. 171) and eggs "up to 150 mm in diameter" (p. 173).
This books is especially recommended for purchase by all scientific institutions covering zoology, and by professional zoologists and palaeontologists. Others interested in Mollusca should not be deterred from purchasing it by the price.