Tiny, meet tiniest. The record for the world’s smallest known snail has been broken just over a month after its announcement. The latest champ: A new species a full 0.3 millimeters smaller.
The new winner is a mere pinhead of a gastropod named Acmella nana. Found in Borneo, it grows a shell 0.50 to 0.60 millimeters in diameter, an international research team reports November 2 in ZooKeys.
Its white shell has “some nice spiral lines,” but otherwise it’s not the most spectacular looking of Malaysian snails, says codescriber Menno Schilthuizen of Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Leiden University in the Netherlands. He and his colleagues gave the snail its formal name (meaning “dwarf” in Latin) based on the discovery of empty shells. Researchers suspect the animals live in limestone caves.