Wikipedia:WikiProject Gastropods/Intro
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The gastropods, gasteropods, or univalves, are the largest and most successful class of mollusks, with 60,000-75,000 known living species. This class contains a vast number of marine, freshwater, and terrestrial species. Species include the snails and slugs, abalone, limpets, cowries, conch and most of the other animals that produce seashells.
The first gastropods were exclusively marine, with the earliest representatives of the group appearing in the Late Cambrian (Chippewaella, Strepsodiscus). By the Ordovician period the gastropods were a varied group present in a range of aquatic habitats. Fossil gastropods are less common during the Palaeozoic era than bivalves. By the Carboniferous period many of the shapes we see in living gastropods can be matched in the fossil record, but despite these similarities in appearance the majority of these older forms are not directly related to living forms. It was during the Mesozoic era that the ancestors of many of the living gastropods evolved.
Gastropods are one of the groups that record the changes in fauna caused by the advance and retreat of the Ice Sheets during the Pleistocene epoch.
Conchology is the scientific study of shells of mollusks, a branch of malacology.
