Elongate fusiform shells generally prominently keeled and with a siphonal canal longer than the spire. Protoconch deviated, paucispiral. Axial sculpture reduced. Operculum horny, pyriform, narrowing regularly to an acute point with an apical nucleus. Central teeth of radula with a curved plate with three cusps flanked on either side by a single elongate lateral.

The family Columbariidae consists of a small group of about fifty species distributed by the writer in six genera, three of which are new. The origin of the family is obscure, as fossils are rare except in Australia and New Zealand, and those that are available shed little light on the subject. Recent species are widely distributed in the Indo-Pacific area and the West Atlantic but as they are common only in moderately deep water, say 70-400 fathoms, no museum has an extensive collection of them and indeed many species are founded on unique specimens, or at most two or three. In this paper the majority of the described species are re-examined with particular emphasis on the Tertiary species of South-Eastern Australia, to which are added eleven new species or subspecies. As the revision of the family arose from work on the Australian fossils, the New Zealand genus Coluzea which has many living and fossil species, has not been studied in great detail.

Wenz (1941, p. 1085) reduced the status of the family to that of a subfamily within the Muricidae; however, this is not accepted by later authors such as Barnard (1959) or Dell (1956) and is not accepted by the writer. It is true that there are certain features of the columbariids which do approach those of the muricids, for example the radula and the apertural characteristics of Columbarium, but the overall morphology of the shell, the nature of the operculum and protoconch suggest relationships with the Fasciolariidae. Also, the group has a long geological history with its origins in the Cretaceous, and is not directly derived from the Muricidae. It seems reasonable, therefore, to give the group family rank within the Muricacea.