Over almost two decades, Conchology, Inc. gathered a wealth of documentation on mollusks, which is at present overwhelming. It concerns almost two million photographs. However, many are duplicates, and we could now filter out the most important and most diversified batches of the many different databases.

The ultimate tool, your conchological desk, has been conceived to group searches that give a relevant result in the following databases: the Encyclopedia - Gastropods.com - WMSDB - Literature and the Shells for Sale. The result is shown on a single page. The Encyclopedia, Gastropods.com and WMSDB are well known in the shell world, but "Literature" is new. It concerns images from thousands of conchological articles and books that appeared before 1950 and that now belong to the public domain.

By searching The Desk, with one search entry you get the results for shells in the Encyclopedia - Gastropods.com - WMSDB - Literature and the Shells for Sale. You can combine searches such as filling in the family and a genus, or a genus name and a species name etc...

Unfortunately, while The Desk will be superb for the beginner and the not so advanced conchologist, it needs some basic conchological knowledge to exploit the full potential of the system. Indeed, in the last decade dozens and dozens of families changed their names for several thousand species. It is useful to know the old family names and the new ones. Antillophos is indeed to be found in BUCCINIDAE while at present it is in NASSARIIDAE, this is one out of thousands of cases.