World’s smallest snail record broken again

Tiny, meet tiniest. The record for the world’s smallest known snail has been broken just over a month after its announcement. The latest champ: a new species a full 0.3 millimeters smaller.

The new winner is a mere pinhead of a gastropod named Acmella nana. Found in Borneo, the snail grows a shell 0.5 to 0.6 millimeters in diameter, researchers report November 2 in ZooKeys.

Its white shell has “some nice spiral lines,” but otherwise it’s not the most spectacular looking of Malaysian snails, says codescriber Menno Schilthuizen of Naturalis Biodiversity Center and Leiden University in the Netherlands.

The previous record holder for smallest snail was Angustopila dominikae from China, described September 28.