Helicina, a stranger on land

land sea snail
Helicina species
Canon XSi | EF-S 18-55mm 5.6 IS +22 diopter | ISO400 | f/18 | 1/200 @35mm

Not an easy one to come by! If you are used to the terrestrial snails anatomy you will easily notice something unusual about this one.

The eyes – placed directly in the head instead of the tip of the tentacles, other differences but not seem in the picture is that it also has an operculum and it doesn’t belong to the Pulmonata order like the common land snails, instead it’s placed under Archaeogastropoda alongside mainly with marine molluscs.

What does this means? That this is pratically a terrestrial sea snail!
It’s most probably an Helicina species, other two genera (Alcadia and Oxyrhombus) occurs in Brazil but seemingly only with one species each, and their distribution doesn’t match with where I found it.

 conchasbrasil.org has a gallery of shells from some brazilian Helicina where is possible to see they can also have some colour variation, so not much of a safe characteristic for identification.

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