Cindy van Dover - David Attenborough TV - Stephen Hawking TV - Charles Spurgeon - Joseph Gordon-Levitt -
There is no other known snail that has a metal fortified shell. Even in the animal kingdom we don’t know of anything else that has a metal fortified shell. The animals have spent evolutionary time honing the composition of a shell to make it deflect predators, to make it strong. So it’s like having armour, right. Here’s this little animals that sits in this warm water that’s coming out, this metal ridge, and it’s sitting there mining these metals. Professor Cindy Van Dover, marine biologist Duke University North Carolina
These are no ordinary snails – they can surf. ibid.
Snails: With rain and the coming of night a secret army comes out of hiding. These are the conditions they like best. David Attenborough, Life in the Undergrowth I, BBC 2005
The shell of the nautilus and the snail differ in the way they twist. Attenborough’s Natural Curiosities: A Curious Twist, Eden 2013
Snails … were distant relatives of other shelled creatures that had dominated the seas for millions of the years: they were the ammonites. ibid.
In the 1960s Ann Clark went to the South Sea Islands to study snails. Over thirty years she saw over a hundred species disappear. So she set up this vital gene bank to tackle the problem. Brave New World With Stephen Hawking, BBC 2011
By perseverance the snail reached the ark. Charles Spurgeon
The spiral in a snail’s shell is the same mathematically as the spiral in the Milky Way galaxy, and it’s also the same mathematically as the spirals in our DNA. It’s the same ratio that you'll find in very basic music that transcends cultures all over the world. Joseph Gordon-Levitt