Range: Papua New Guinea (Hansa Bay, Bismarck Sea); reported from Solomon Islands.

Description: Small to moderately small, moderately light to moderately solid. Last whorl conical; outline convex at adapical half, straight (right side) to concave (left side) below. Shoulder angulate, sometimes irregularly undulate. Spire high, outline concave. Larval shell of 2 whorls, maximum diameter about 0.9 mm. First 4-5 postnuclear whorls tuberculate, later whorls undulate to smooth. Teleoconch sutural ramps flat, with 1-2 increasing to 2-3 weak spiral grooves and many spiral striae. Last whorl with variably spaced, often finely granulose spiral ribs from base to shoulder, sometimes largely smooth adapically.

Ground colour white. Entire last whorl encircled with closely spaced, fine and coarse, dotted and solid, yellowish to reddish brown lines; a pale spiral band may be present near centre, with brown axial maculae above and below. First 1-2 adapical spiral lines consist partly or completely of axial dashes, some of which extend onto shoulder ramp. Larval whorls white. Postnuclear sutural ramps with irregularly spaced yellowish to reddish brown radial streaks. Aperture white.

Periostracum thin, with spiral rows of fine tufts (Coomans & Moolenbeek, 1982).

Dorsum of foot beige, radially mottled with brown and with a spotted blackish brown pre-marginal line; anterior marginal zone dull orange, followed by a cluster of blackish brown spots. Sole of foot beige washed with tan. Rostrum light tan, may be dotted with red. Tentacles light beige. Siphon dull white to beige, transversely mottled with light brown (Pl. 76, Fig. 45) (Coomans & Moolenbeek, 1982; Chaberman, pers. comm., 1981).

Habitat and Habits: Reported from 40 to 90 m; in muddy sand off deep reefs, associated with purple algae. The species is reported to feed on polychaetes (Chaberman, pers. comm., 1981; Coomans & Moolenbeek, 1982).

Discussion: C. papuensis resembles C. voluminalis. C. voluminalis is a twice as large species with a lower more concave-sided spire (RSH 0.04-0.17) and a largely smooth last whorl; its shoulder is often broadly carinate and the spiral striation is obsolete on its late sutural ramps. Specimens from Solomon Is. (Pl. 30, Fig. 22) and Papua New Guinea with largely smooth last whorl are only provisionally assigned to C. papuensis, because they may be subadult specimens of C. voluminalis.

C. papuensis range map

This section contains verbatim reproductions of the accounts of 316 species of Conus from the Indo-Pacific region, from Manual of the Living Conidae, by Röckel, Korn and Kohn (1995). They are reproduced with the kind permission of the present publisher, Conchbooks.

All plates and figures referred to in the text are also in Röckel, Korn & Kohn, 1995. Manual of the Living Conidae Vol. 1: Indo-Pacific Region.

The range maps have been modified so that each species account has it own map, rather than one map that showed the ranges of several species in the original work. This was necessary because each species account is on a separate page on the website and not confined to the order of accounts in the book.