 Such information as did exist on the radulae and the external anatomy of the living animals was widely scattered in the scientific literature, and internal anatomical descriptions were not available until fairly recently.In 2019 a new molecular phylogeny of marginelliform gastropods has been established by Fedosov A.E., Caballer Gutierrez M., Buge B., Sorokin P.V., Puillandre N., Bouchet P. 

The shell of Marginellidae is usually small, but varies in different species from minute to medium-sized.The external color of the shell can be white, cream, yellow, orange, red, or brown, and can be uniformly colored, or patterned in various ways.