A species of clam that was only found by fossils has turned up on an American beach.
Scientists combed over the rocky intertidal zone of southern California for many, many years after the discovery of the small, translucent bivalve.
It's not very common to find a species first known from the fossil record alive in Southern California.
It was only in November of last year that he stumbled upon two strange-looking, little white specks, after decades of searching for sea slugs, nudibranchs, and other invertebrates.
His shells were only 10 millimeters long. I had never seen a species like this before.
The curator of mollusks at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History was the one who received the photos. The species couldn't be placed by the other person. A specimen was needed.
When he returned to collect the clams, they were gone. It took him a long time to get his hands on another clam. He was able to get four specimen for study.
The species couldn't be found even then.
The curator says that this really started the search for him.
All of the scientific literature from 1758 to the present is needed when I suspect a new species. It can be difficult, but with experience it can be done quickly.
Scientists were able to find an illustration of a clam drawn in 1937.
It was classified by scientists as Bornia cooki at the time, but has now been changed to Cymatioa. The site is between 28,000 and 36,000 years old, which is when sea levels reached much further inland than they do today.
The illustrations were based on a museum specimen. The same species of clam was found at Naples Point.
It wasn't dead.
There is a long history of shell-collecting and malacology in Southern California, including people who are interested in the harder to find micro-mollusks.
Some people don't know why clams left Southern California. Researchers suspect that these living fossils only recently re-enter the region, carried northwards as larvae during the marine heatwaves that occurred between the years of 2014 and 2016
This isn't the first surprise discovery of an extinct marine animal.
The giant coelacanths were once thought to be extinct, but as it turns out, they've been around for more than 65 million years.
It's not likely that C. cooki will be the last fossil to rise from the dead.
It was published in ZooKeys.
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