Laevistrombus is a genus of sea snails, marine gastropod mollusks in the family Strombidae, the true conchs.[2]
The taxon Laevistrombus was introduced in the literature as a subgenus of Strombus by Tetsuaki Kira (1955) in the third printing of the 1st edition of Coloured Illustrations of the Shells of Japan. It comprised two species, Strombus (Laevistrombus) canarium and Strombus (L.) isabella Lamarck, 1822. No type specimen was designated, and Kira gave no formal description or statement of differentiation, as required by the ICZN code to validate the name. In a later version of the book, Laevistrombus was elevated to genus level, but a description was still lacking. Rüdiger Bieler and Richard Petit (1996) considered it a nomen nudum, and the authorship was transferred to Robert Tucker Abbott (1960), who had provided a proper description and illustrations of Laevistrombus and specified a type species, Strombus canarium L., in the first volume of his monograph Indo-Pacific Mollusca.[3][4][5] The currently accepted classification was proposed by Sepkoski (2002), who elevated Laevistrombus to genus level based on palaeontological data.[1]