A wealth of firsthand information combined with major sources provides an understanding of desert zoogeography and evolution.

Part I: Zoogeography of Southwestern Nearctic Mollusks
Integrates and evaluates information of interest to students of variation, evolution, zoogeography, and ecology of the fauna of the arid Southwest.

Part II: Annotated Check List of Recent Arizona Mollusks
Treatment of 173 valid species and 46 recognized subspecies gives nomenclature, type localities, distribution in Arizona, occurrence elsewhere in the Southwestern Molluscan Province, general Recent distribution, presence or absence in Late Cenozoic deposits, and synonymy.

Joseph C. Bequaert developed his interest in malacology following his retirement in 1956 as Curator of Insects at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at the Harvard Medical School. More than 50 of his many publications are devoted to land and fresh-water mollusks. He received the Doctor of Natural Sciences degree from the University of Ghent, and has been a visiting scholar at the University of Arizona.

Walter B. Miller, whose particular fields of interest lie in the taxonomy, zoogeography, speciation, and evolution of the land snails of Western North America—especially the Southwestern United States and adjacent Mexican states—has described numerous new species from these areas. He joined the Biological Sciences faculty at the University of Arizona in 1967, and holds degrees from the U.S. Naval Academy, California Institute of Technology, and the University of Arizona.

“To date, this is the most complete coverage of the mollusks of Arizona and the adjacent areas of the arid Southwest. Many hundreds of new detailed localities are recorded for the 154 native species reported from Arizona, based mainly on the extensive collecting activities of the two authors and their colleague, Richard H. Russell.”—The Quarterly Review of Biology