The shell is moderately small (maximum length 60 mm) and broadly fusiform. The spire is high and acute, consisting of six or seven shouldered postnuclear whorls and a protoconch of undetermined nature. The suture is weakly impressed. The body whorl is large and fusoid. The aperture is moderately large and ovate to subcircular, with a moderately broad, shallow anal sulcus. The outer apertural lip is erect and finely dentate, and its interior is briefly lirate. The columellar lip is entirely adherent and bears five to eight tiny denticles at its anterior end; a single small node parietally delimits the anal sulcus. The siphonal canal is moderately short, almost straight, and narrowly open to the right.
The body whorl bears three rounded, almost spineless varices. Intervarical axial sculpture con-sists of two or three ridges of moderate strength. Spiral sculpture consists of numerous, seemingly scabrous primary, secondary, and tertiary cords in the pattern 1-3-2-3-1. Where the strongest primary cord, at the shoulder margin, crosses the varix, a short, stout, recurved spine is apparent. The entire varical margin bears a thin, poorly developed erect webbing, this strongest anteriorly on the body and at the top of the canal. Below this, on the canal, one or two short, ventrally open spines are developed. Shell color is white to ivory or light tan, with three spiral brown bands on the body. The interior of the aperture is white.

This species has been known for many years but has persistently been located in West Africa by certain workers, apparently as a result of an erroneous locality in Adanson (1757), a non binominal work in which it was first described and figured. Additional confusion has led some recent authors to call a slender, trivaricate form of the West African Muricanthus varius by this name (i.e. S. senegalensis). Another superficially similar species is S. tenuivaricosus (Dautzenberg, 1927), about which more is said below. S. springeri (Bullis, 1964) appears to be a more coarsely sculptured form of this species from the southern Caribbean and northern Brazil

The southern Caribbean to southern Brazil.