19 June 2008 - 16:20That’s as far as the Escargot

I promise I will refrain from making any snail jokes that involve their speed, or lack thereof. It’s a tired cliché and overused. So I will ‘slip’ straight into the subject at hand: Snails in Blue Amber.

Gastropoda

Snails are second only to the insects in abundance of number of species. They’re all over the place: from your own backyard, to the hottest deserts, the highest mountains and deepest oceans. There are so many, we even eat them, collect their shells and have use them for money. They are classified as mollusks, which make them relatives to squid, octopuses, oysters, scallops, and several other delicacies.

Snails and slugs (a slug is basically a snail with a housing problem) are the oldest species still around and fairly unchanged since their creation/phylogenesis in/during/around the Late Cambrian Era (aprox. 500 Million years ago), although their development to the form we know them today as, is pegged by malacologists (scientists who study them) at or around the Mesozoic Era, a time span extending roughly over 180 Million years.

If all these numbers sound a little vague to you it’s because they are: where phylogenesis and taxonomy are concerned, malacologists are still, er… slugging it out.

But all this scientific squabbling doesn’t stop the good ol’ snail from procreating to the point of plague. Most snails and slugs may behave as male for a while, then as a female. In their species that’s called hermaphroditism. In ours that would be called kinky. A few other species procreate through self-fertilization (where’s the fun in that?!).

Their shells are a whole psychedelic world unto themselves. They come in all shapes, shades and sizes, depending on the species and its location. It has several layers, and is typically made of calcium carbonate secreted by the mantle part of the body. Think of it as a body-covering fingernail. And the great part is, the shell can last for millions of years.

Blue Amber Snails

We know that there are no inclusions in blue amber — that is, there are no bugs – and we theorize that the heat caused any inclusions to be basically cooked. But there are shells.

The shells are generally never found inside the amber, but only stuck to the surface and/or partially submerged. Hence it’s a little hard to classify them as ‘inclusions’. What more, the amber itself must have been in an extremely liquid state when the empty shells came in contact with it, because it somehow managed to get all the way into the interior.

But the classification takes the cigar. As far as we can tell, all the snail shells found in blue amber are sea snails, probably of the genus Turritella. We know that amber rested at some point under the sea, but that it was still liquid enough to fill out the shell is an interesting tidbit. From hereon it seems the shell decided to take a ride out of the ocean and into the mountains. Think escargot on an elevator: the amber comes from the forests into the depth of the ocean, takes on a shell as passenger and goes back up into the mountains. The whole trip takes several million years of course, but what a ride.

Fossilized Turritella are nothing rare. Carbonate stone made from large quantities of Turritella shells are called Turritella Limestone, and if silicified, Turritella Agate. Especially the agate stones are used as jewelry and hailed as spiritual stones, capable of healing everything from fatigue to broken families. Germany even boasts the Turritella Plate of Ermingen, teeming with Turritella shells within its sediments.

But finding them in amber – more so, in Blue Amber – is not so common. So far less than a dozen shells have been found sitting on Blue Amber, and only about four are complete. How the shells got there in the first place is still a mystery. But wherever the snails were going, the amber was faster.

Sorry, I couldn’t help it.

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