麻豆淫院

They say beauty is everywhere if we have eyes to see. A team of scientists looked at a tiny, 3-mm snail and saw art.

An international group of malacologists (researchers studying mollusks) led by Serbian Ph.D. student Vuka拧in Goj拧ina and his Hungarian supervisor, Barna P谩ll-Gergely, was exploring snail diversity in Southeast Asia when a species unknown to science grabbed their attention, prompting them to name it after cubist artist Pablo Picasso.

Unlike most other snails, Anauchen picasso has rectangularly angled whorls that, according to the scientists, make it look "like a cubist interpretation of other snails with 'normal' shell shapes."

The research team just published a 300-page article including the descriptions of 46 new species of microsnails from Cambodia, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam. The findings are in the journal ZooKeys.

"Although the shell sizes of these snails are less than 5 mm, they are real beauties! Their shells exhibit extraordinary complexity," they say. "For example, the aperture (the 'opening' of the shell) is armed with numerous tooth-like barriers, which are most probably useful against predators. Furthermore, several of the new species have an aperture that turns upwards or downwards, which means that some species carry their shells upside-down."

These apertural barriers and the orientation of the last whorl on the shell were among the primary characters that helped the researchers tell different snails apart.

While many of these new species were collected recently, several, unknown to science until now, were found in the collection of the Florida Museum of Natural History, collected all the way in the 1980's. It is likely (and in some cases, certain) that the locations where these snails were found have already been destroyed by deforestation and limestone quarrying, which are the major threats to locally endemic land snails in Southeast Asia.