When I was a kid, I had some sort of "big book of questions and answers" that was utterly filled with info on various things...and one question went along the lines of "what are cowrie shells?" At the time, all I caught from it was that they were used for bartering and such, but anyways, moving on.
Well, fast forward to 2001 - I had just joined someone's roleplaying group, and I needed a name for a furret character I'd made up. For some reason I remembered that question about the cowrie shells and thought that "Cowrie" sounded good for a name, so I used it.
Fast forward again to 2004, when I joined this forum. I wanted a name that wasn't the handle I usually used on the internet, since I was getting bored with it, and I'm bad with thinking up usernames on the fly. By that time I wasn't using the character mentioned above anymore, so in a fit of nostalgia or something I decided I'd take that name for myself since I didn't want to take a long time in thinking up another name.
So yeah.