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Snails

Snail
Grapevinesnail 01.jpg
Helix pomatia, a species of land snail
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Mollusca
Class: Gastropoda

Snail is a common name that is applied most often to land snails, terrestrial pulmonate gastropod molluscs. However, the common name snail is also applied to most of the members of the molluscan class Gastropoda that have a coiled shell that is large enough for the animal to retract completely into. When the word snail is used in this most general sense, it includes not just land snails but also thousands of species of sea snails and freshwater snails. Occasionally a few other molluscs that are not actually gastropods, such as the Monoplacophora, which superficially resemble small limpets, may also informally be referred to as "snails".

Snail-like animals that naturally lack a shell, or have only an internal shell, are mostly called slugs, and land snails that have only a very small shell (that they cannot retract into) are often called semi-slugs.

Snails that respire using a lung belong to the group Pulmonata, while those with gills form a polyphyletic group; in other words, snails with gills form a number of taxonomic groups that are not necessarily more closely related to each other than they are related to some other groups. Both snails that have lungs and snails that have gills have diversified so widely over geological time that a few species with gills can be found on land and numerous species with lungs can be found in freshwater. Even a few marine species have lungs.


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Wikipedia

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