Do freshwater snails make good tennis players? One of them certainly has the name for it. Enter Travunijana djokovici, a new species of aquatic snail named after famous Serbian tennis player Novak Djokovic. Slovak biospeleologist Jozef Grego and Montenegrin zoologist Vladimir Pešić of the University of Montenegro discovered the new snail in a karstic spring […]
While most of the knowledge about tiny snails comes from studying empty shells sifted out from piles of dust and sand, the present research is the first contemporary microscopic exploration of organs in cave snails tinier than 2 mm. The paper, published in the open-access journal Subterranean Biology, reveals that underneath the seemingly fragile shells […]
Minuscule snails defy current knowledge and scientific terminology about terrestrial “microsnails”. While examining soil samples collected from the base of limestone rocks in Guangxi Province, Southern China, scientists Barna Páll-Gergely and Takahiro Asami from Shinshu University, Adrienne Jochum, University and Natural History Museum of Bern, and András Hunyadi, found several minute empty light grey shells, which […]
As tiny as 1.7 mm, a snail whose relatives live exclusively in the deep recesses of caves, provided a sensational discovery from the depths of Nodong cave, South Korea, back in 2000 for its collector, J. S. Lee. It is the only cave-dwelling representative of the family of hollow-shelled snails in the whole of Asia […]
Having been collected back in the 19th century during an expedition in South America, a rather small snail species has been sitting around on the shelves of Madrid’s National Museum of Natural Sciences ever since. Covered in more than a century-old dust, it was described as new only recently when an obscure specimen placed in […]