Researchers Find Living Clam Thought to Have Gone Extinct Thousands of Years Ago

[Judi Lynn]

While looking for sea slugs in California, a marine ecologist came across the tiny, ten-millimeter mollusks

Margaret Osborne
Daily Correspondent

November 17, 2022



Scientists have discovered the first living C. cooki specimen. Jeff Goddard

Marine ecologist Jeff Goddard was searching for sea slugs in the tide pools of a California beach near Santa Barbara when something strange caught his eye: two tiny translucent white clams. Goddard was surprised—he had studied California’s intertidal habitats for decades, but had never seen anything like these delicate little mollusks, per a statement.

At the time, in November 2018, he didn’t realize he was looking at a species that scientists believed had gone extinct thousands of years ago.

“Their shells were only ten millimeters long,” Goddard, a researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says in the statement. “But when they extended and started waving about a bright white-striped foot longer than their shell, I realized I had never seen this species before.”

Not wanting to disrupt a possible breeding pair, he did not collect the animals. Rather, he snapped some pictures and sent them off to his colleague, Paul Valentich-Scott, curator of malacology at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History.

More:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-find-living-clam-thought-to-have-gone-extinct-thousands-of-years-ago-180981142/