the.com/mollusc
A squishy body that invented the shell, the ink jet, and the giant eyeball before you did.
means A soft-bodied invertebrate — snails, clams, octopuses, and their kin — usually protected by a hard shell it either carries or quietly gave up.
from From Latin 'molluscus' meaning soft, itself from 'mollis' (soft) — the same root that gives us 'mollify' and 'emollient.' The scientific grouping was sharpened in the late 1700s by French naturalist Georges Cuvier, who needed a name for the squishy, shell-less cousins of clams and snails before the category widened to cover the whole soft-bodied clan.
- group size
- second-largest animal phylum after arthropods
- biggest eye
- colossal squid eye is size of a soccer ball
- brainy outlier
- octopuses are molluscs with ninth of neurons in arms
- shell chemistry
- nacre forms from same mineral as chalk