Rare snail discovery on Texel

Translated from Ecomare museum on Texel island, the Netherlands:

Unique find on seafront – 09/11/06

Less than a centimeter wide, but still very special! The small periwinkle found last week on the sea wall of Texel is quite rare in the Netherlands. On Texel the snail even had never been seen before. NIOZ researcher Marc Lavaleye found the new species by accident near the research institute at the southern tip of the island.

Rather no wet feet

Small periwinkles have a dark brown shell, sometimes with a slight rim around the entrance. They are more pointed than common periwinkles. They can be found along the Atlantic coast of Europe from southern Norway to the Canary Islands. The snails like sitting in rock crevices and between rocks in parts of coasts that only get wet at very high water. Usually they get only really flooded during storms. So it’s really more a land animal than a marine animal. They can therefore survive well without water, eating especially lichen.

Rare

Small periwinkles are found only rarely in the Netherlands. Only on the South and North Pier of IJmuiden harbour they occur more often. Occasionally specimens beach on floating objects such as cork, plastic, thongweed or whelks‘ eggs.

In bubble-rafting snails, the eggs came first: here.

Scientists have built the most comprehensive timeline yet for working out the exact order in which geological and archaeological events happened in Britain over the last three million years. And they’ve done it using fossilised snails: here.