Discovered in the deep: the snail with iron armour

The first in a new Guardian series on the remarkable new species being found in the oceans introduces the bizarre scaly-foot snail, or sea pangolin ? a creature with a special trickA golden snail with a foot clad in iron scales seems like a creature from science fiction. But in a few remote spots of the Indian Ocean these snails are very real.?It looks like an armoured knight crawling around on the deep-sea floor,? says Julia Sigwart, a biologist at Frankfurt?s Senckenberg Research Institute and one of the only people to have seen a living scaly-foot snail (Chrysomallon squamiferum), also known as a sea pangolin. Continue reading...