A tiny mollusc called a chiton has been recorded for the first time for 72 years in Chile.
November 2013: The discovery of the tiny mollusc was made by Dr Moisés Aguilera from the Intertidal Ecology at the Centro de Estudios Avanzados en Zonas Áridas (CEAZA), during a field trip to launch The Open University’s global iSpot website in Chile.
Dr Aguilera said: “It was exciting because this is a very rare species, the only ovoviviparous chiton in the world and it seems to have a constrained distributional range which is not yet determined. The finding could be of global significance since populations of this species are expected to be very sensitive to local extinction. This finding will stimulate future scientific studies on these populations.”
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