A tricky wee mollusk hiding in plain sight.
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Snails’ ancestors are one of the earliest known types of animals in the world. There is fossil evidence of primitive gastropods dating back to the late Cambrian period; this means that they lived nearly 500 million years ago.
All land snails are gastropod mollusks, meaning that they belong to the same group of octopuses, which are part of the phylum Mollusca. At the same time, they are members of the class Gastropoda, which includes all snails and slugs. Being a mollusk means lacking an internal skeleton and bones, but snails are not unprotected.
Gastropods can adapt to a variety of living conditions, and they don’t require large amounts of food. They have been able to continually evolve to survive the conditions around them which many researchers find to be very fascinating.
Gastropods belong to the phylum Mollusca (or Mollusks) a classification of invertebrate animals with a soft unsegmented body, sometimes covered with an exoskeleton or shell. This phylum, Mollusca, includes animals like squids, octopuses, clams and cuttlefishes among others. Snails and slugs are both Gastropods. Therefore they are closely related, regardless the fact that slugs lack a protective shell.