News: News Archives Ocean Seep Mollusks May Share Evolutionary
History with Other Deep-Sea Creatures The unusual mollusks of
oceanic cold seeps—strange clams, mussels and sea snails that
thrive in the sulfur and methane-rich environments—are on
average older than the marine mollusk community as a whole,
according to a new report in the 8 September issue of the
journal Science. On average, the first appearance of cold seep
mollusk genera in the geological record is a full epoch earlier
than that of marine mollusks in general, according to Steffen
Kiel and Crispin Little of the University of Leeds. These
findings indicate that the long evolutionary history of the seep
mollusks is more similar to that of other deep-sea animals than
to some of their mollusk contemporaries from other parts of the
oceans. The report was presented at the 2006 British Association
for the Advancement of Science (BA) annual conference on 7
September at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. At
the conference, more than 400 of th