Actually, the scientist Jeff Goddard from the University of California in Santa Barbara 2018 was looking for certain sea snack buns in the tedules of his southern California homeland: he turned stones on the rocky coast when he pushed onto a strange shell with transparent shells - one Animal that he had never seen before. "When she opened herself and waved with a light, striped foot that was longer than her shells, I knew that this was something special," says the marine biologist, who together with the Malakologist Paul Valentich Scott from Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History describes in »Zooys«. Ultimately, the animal turned out to be a living fossil.
"I know this clam family on the coasts of America very well. It was something I had never seen before, " says Valentich-Scott, who had to wait a long time to see the molluscs himself. It was only after nine further attempts that the two researchers discovered one of the shells again, which could finally be intensively examined in the laboratory.
The shells, which reminded of another California mussel genre, were decisive for the destination, but also had great differences. Since the search for species already described as relatives were unsuccessful, Valentich Scott and Goddard expanded their research on fossil species of species-and found what they were looking that of the newly found copy fit. The fossils came from a deposit in the Baldwin Hills near Los Angeles and were part of a collection of one million mussel fossils.
In fact, only two specimens of Bornia cooki were found in this huge number of fossil shells , one of which is deposited in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County and was studied by Valentich-Scott. The comparison finally confirmed that the fossil and present-day finds belong to the same species, which has now been reclassified and is called Cymatioa cooki).
The two researchers do not yet know why she stayed hidden for so long. Goddard suspects that they probably live further south along the Mexican Peninsula Baja California and have only spread north recently. From 2014 to 2016 there was a heat wave in the Pacific along California, which had used different types to spread north. Since the shell is relatively small and grows slowly, it escaped the mussel collectors of California - until she found Goddard by chance.
