Range: S. Pacific from Coral Sea to French Polynesia.

Description: Medium-sized, moderately solid to solid; Size varies with location. Last whorl ventricosely conical or conoid- cylindrical to ovate; outline variably convex adapically, less so (right side) or slightly concave (left side) toward base. Aperture wider at base than near shoulder. Shoulder subangulate to angulate. Spire low, outline straight to concave. First 5-6 postnuclear whorls tuberculate. Teleoconch sutural ramps concave, with a prominent subsutural ridge and 1 increasing to 3-6 spiral grooves. Last whorl with 7-13 well separated punctate spiral grooves on abapical third and 4-9 grooves below shoulder; ribbons between grade to ribs basally and sometimes at shoulder.

Ground colour white, partially suffused with pink to purple. Last whorl with 3 rather broad spiral bands of confluent violet or brown nebulous flecks and tent-like spots, below shoulder, just above centre, and within abapical third, alternating with 3-4 rather narrow spiral zones of very small brown to dark reddish or purplish brown triangular spots. Colour bands contain prominent to obsolete spiral rows of irregularly alternating white and brown dots and dashes. Larval whorls purple. Later postnuclear sutural ramps with purple or brown radial streaks and blotches, and with brown dots on subsutural ridge. Aperture yellow to orange within.

Periostracum almost colourless, thin, translucent, and smooth (Hart, 1991).

Body pattern similar to that of the shell but in lighter violet (Richards, pers. comm., 1988); animal cream with light violet lines, with a dark purplish brown ring around siphon (Hamann, pers. comm., 1989).

Habitat and Habits: Intertidal to 60 m, on seeward sides of coral reefs and in lagoons, on large stretches or small pockets of sand (Hart, 1992).

Discussion: C. adamsonii is so distinctive that it cannot be confused with any of its congeners.

C. adamsonii 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.