Episode 234 - Snails and Slugs

The Common Descent Podcast

Common Descent

Science, Natural Sciences, Education, Earth Sciences, Science:natural Sciences

4.8 • 764 Ratings

🗓️ 4 January 2026

⏱️ 144 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From deep-sea trenches to your home garden, gastropods (snails and slugs) are among the most diverse and successful groups of animal life in Earth history. This episode, we’ll explore what makes these animals distinctive, we’ll touch on their extraordinary fossil record, and we’ll investigate the many evolutionary experiments gastropods have undergone in their anatomy and lifestyle. In the news: squishable ants, false saber-tooths, bee burrows, and baby ankylosaurs Time markers:Intro & Announcements: 00:00:00News: 00:06:30Main discussion, Part 1: 00:43:55Main discussion, Part 2: 01:40:10Patron question: 02:10:25 Check out our website for this episode’s blog post and more: http://commondescentpodcast.com/ Join us on Patreon to support the podcast and enjoy bonus content: https://www.patreon.com/commondescentpodcast Got a topic you want to hear about? Submit your episode request here: https://commondescentpodcast.com/request-a-topic/ Lots more ways to connect with us: https://linktr.ee/common_descent The Intro and Outro music is “On the Origin of Species” by Protodome. More music like this at http://ocremix.org Musical Interludes are "Professor Umlaut" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Common Descent Podcast.
0:19.0	Hello, Will.
0:21.0	Hello, David. Hello, David.
0:22.2	Hello, listeners, and welcome to Common Descent.
0:25.3	This is our first episode of the year.
0:28.4	Yeah, yeah.
0:28.9	We're looking forward to a whole big year full of paleontology and evolution and earth history and the stuff we like to talk about.
0:36.1	This is episode 234, and this episode's topic is snails and slugs.
0:44.0	Yeah, a nice owey-gouy one to begin the year.
0:47.9	Starting off the year, slimy.
0:51.1	This will be great.
0:52.2	This one, we've got a long time in this podcast without really devoting attention to gastropods.
0:57.9	This is going to be the gastropods episode.
1:00.8	We will talk about what makes these animals distinctive, and we'll talk about their evolutionary history and their fossil record.
1:08.5	This one was a lot of fun because I did a bunch of research to learn about
1:12.7	these animals and I didn't know a lot of this stuff, so I have a much deeper appreciation
1:17.4	for snails and slugs now. Yeah, that's pretty neat. This episode has also been a long time coming
1:23.8	because it was requested by so many people. As usual, every episode of the podcast
1:29.3	is topics requested by our listeners. Gastropods are popular. This topic was requested by
1:38.2	Gordon, Devo, John, Aaron, Science Skink, Michael Lewis, Gemfire, Sophie, August, Big, Charlie, Noah, Dustin, Lou,
1:51.0	brachiofore, serpentine, IOC electus, Mads, Dance, Susanna, Rebecca, Maui, Ollie, Toy, Ferdafruind.
1:59.3	We're about halfway there.
	...

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