Earth/Environment
So much for the man-sized snail, plus Indonesia’s quake risk, overheated reefs and more in this week’s news
By Science News
CTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>
Snail knocked down to size
After 90 years, paleontologists at London’s Natural History Museum have demoted a man-sized snail to a tiny worm track. In 1921, British construction workers dug up a spectacular 2-meter-long corkscrew fossil; museum paleontologists dubbed it
Dinocochlea ingens
, or “terrible snail.” But now Paul Taylor and Consuelo Sendino say the fossil is nothing more than the traces of a threadworm just a few millimeters across. The worm burrowed in a corkscrew path, and sand grains cemented and enlarged the burrow to fantastic size, the scientists write in an upcoming