New Species of Land Snails Discovered

The term “microsnail” normally refers to species that have shells smaller than five millimetres.

“The world is full of small snails“, he says, “on land as well as in the seas or in the freshwater”.

An global team of researchers were examining soil samples at the base of limestone rocks in Guangxi Province, Southern China, when they stumbled upon the world’s smallest species of land snails.

The newly discovered Angustopila dominikae is a really tiny snail.

Another new species, Angustopila subelevata, measures only about 0.036 inches (0.91 mm) in height.

“Adult individuals of Angustopila subelevata and A. dominikae represent the smallest known members of the Hypselostomatidae, and thus are amongst the smallest land snails ever reported”, Dr Pall-Gergely and co-author wrote in a paper published in the journal Zootaxa.

The snails were found when the researchers came across seven empty light grey shells while investigating soil samples in Guangxi.

Called Angustopila dominikae, its shell measures just 0.86 millimetres and is so small that 10 of the gastropods would sit comfortably in the eye of large sewing needle. At first sight, they thought the snail was a normal specimen that didn’t develop yet, but further investigations revealed that it was an adult, explained Adrienne Jochum, a researcher at Switzerland’s University of Bern and Bern Natural History Museum, in the study.

The team hopes the results of their find will provide the taxonomic ground work for future studies concerning the evolution of dwarfism in invertebrates, according to the Daily Record.

The evolutionary relationships between these species, as well as the number of existing species are little known.

[Senile sea snails are helping us understand memory loss].

Due to the size of the snails and the fact that they are rarely found alive, snail species of this size are very hard to discover – the bodies often degrade a long period before the shells do. That honor goes only to ammonicera minortalis that ranges just from 0.32 mm to 0.46 mm in length.