Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) agreement, in which it is listed as Strombus gigas. This species is not endangered in the Caribbean as a whole, but is commercially threatened in numerous areas, largely due to extreme overfishing. Taxonomy and etymology History The queen conch was originally described from a shell in 1758 by Swedish naturalist and taxonomist Carl Linnaeus, who originated the system of binomial nomenclature. Linnaeus named the species Strombus gigas, which remained the accepted name for over 200 years. Linnaeus did not mention a specific locality for this species, giving only "America" as the type locality. The specific name is the ancient Greek word (), which means "giant", referring to the large size of this snail compared with almost all other gastropod molluscs. Strombus lucifer, which was considered to be a synonym much later, was also described by Linnaeus in Systema Naturae. In the first half of the 20th century, the type material for the species was thought to have been lost; in other words, the shell on which Linnaeus based his original description and which would very likely have been in his own collection, was apparently missing, which created a problem for taxonomists. To remedy this, in 1941 a neotype of this species was designated by the American malacologists William J. Clench and R. Tucker Abbott. In this case, the neotype was not an actual shell or whole specimen, but a figure from a 1684 book , published 23 years before Linnaeus was born by the Italian Jesuit scholar Filippo Buonanni (1638–1723). This was the first book that was solely about seashells. In 1953 the Swedish malacologist Nils Hjalmar Odhner searched the Linnaean Collection at Uppsala University and discovered the missing type shell, thereby invalidating Clench and Abbott's neotype designation. Strombidae's taxonomy was extensively revised in the 2000s and a few subgenera, including Eustrombus, were elevated to genus level by some authors. Petuch and Petuch and Roberts recombined this species as Eustrombus gigas, and Landau and collaborators (2008) recombined it as Lobatus gigas. In 2020, it was recombined as Aliger gigas by Maxwell and colleagues, which is the current valid name according to the World Register of Marine Species. Phylogeny The phylogenetic relationships among the Strombidae were mainly studied by Simone (2005) and Latiolais (2006), using two distinct methods. Simone proposed a cladogram (a tree of descent) based on an extensive morpho-anatomical analysis of representatives of Aporrhaidae,