Halloween Treat

It s hard to miss a flamingo tongue snail (Cyphoma gibbosum), with its mantle splotched with a pattern of irregularly shaped orange, white and black spots.Considered gastropod mollusks, the snails are members of the Mollusca phylum, which includes octopuses and oysters, and the class Gastropoda, which includes marine snails with and without shells.Mollusks encompass a wide variety of animals, with the lineage dating back some 500 million years. Just recently, in a study published in the Oct. 27, 2011, issue of the journal Nature, Casey Dunn, an evolutionary biologist at Brown University, and colleagues put together the most comprehensive evolutionary tree of mollusks.