Latest Radula Stories

The radula sounds like something from a horror movie – a conveyor belt lined with hundreds of rows of interlocking teeth. In fact, radulas are found in the mouths of most molluscs, from the giant squid to the garden snail. Now, a "prototype" radula found in 500-million-year-old fossils studied by University of Toronto graduate student Martin Smith, shows that the earliest radula was not a flesh-rasping terror, but a tool for humbly scooping food from the muddy sea floor. The Cambrian...

Using a special form of X-ray technology, French and American researchers have managed to discern the diets of the extinct, squid-like creatures known as ammonites.The experts used the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) in Grenoble to analyze ammonite fossils using synchrotron X-rays. They discovered that the ancient creatures, which died out more than 65 million years ago and are related to the squid and the octopus, ate plankton.According to an ESRF press release dated January...

Two world experts in micro molluscs, Anselmo Peñas and Emilio Rolán, have made an unprecedented description in a scientific publication of a combined total of 209 snail species. Commissioned by the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, the study was unveiled in September in the French capital, and it covers the most new species from a single genus of any study to date."Never have so many species from a single genus, nor even from a single family, been described in one single...