Welcome to the fascinating world of terrestrial gastropod mollusks, also known as land snails and slugs.
Like other mollusks, gastropods have have a radula, a tongue-like structure in the mouth used to rasp food chunks into the mouth and a mantle, the organ that builds a hard shell (less active in slugs). What separates gastropods from other mollusks is torsion, a process during early development resulting in the head-foot part of the body rotating 180 degrees with respect to the shell and internal organs. Gastropods are the only mollusks that occur on land. Malacology – the study of mollusks – has been an integral part of Carnegie Museum of Natural History since its founding in 1895.
Funding in 2022 from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service via the Wildlife Management Institute allowed us to complete and release this web resource
