What it is
A small snail that lived on land, not in water. At Chemnitz, the dig turned up more than a hundred snail remains in the old forest soil, some still pressed against a fossil root. They were living in the ground among the trees when the ash came down.
One of the first land snails
Dendropupa is one of the oldest land snails known. The first ones were found in Nova Scotia, about 310 million years old, inside the rock that had filled a hollow fossil tree at Joggins. Charles Lyell and William Dawson found them there together, and Dawson described the species, which he called Pupa vetusta.
A cameo in Darwin
In On the Origin of Species, in 1859, Darwin used it to show how patchy the fossil record is: from all the long ages before the dinosaurs, he wrote, not a single land snail was known, with one exception, found by Lyell in the coal-age rocks of North America. A year later, in the first public debate over Darwin's theory, Bishop Samuel Wilberforce used the same little fossil against him.
Read the sources
- A snapshot of an early Permian ecosystem preserved by explosive volcanism: new results from the Chemnitz Petrified Forest · Palaios (2012)
- North American Paleozoic land snails, with a summary of other Paleozoic nonmarine snails · U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 1072 (1979)
- Gastropods in the fossil record · Hooper Virtual Natural History Museum, Carleton University
- Did you know? Joggins and Darwin · Nova Scotia Department of Natural Resources
- On the Origin of Species, first edition (1859), chapter 9 · Project Gutenberg