Juvenile snail with preserved soft tissue in mid-Cretaceous amber from Myanmar suggests a cyclophoroidean (Gastropoda) ancestry

Gastropods are generally rare in amber. In this paper we describe an example of exceptional soft-bodied preservation in a fossil terrestrial mollusk-a snail shell with some tissue, including part of the cephalic region (head) with a tentacle and inferred eye stalk, and potentially part of the foot and operculum. The snail, a probable juvenile, is preserved in Burmese amber (Burmite) from Myanmar, of earliest Cenomanian age. Morphological evidence suggests a cyclophoroidean ancestry and a possible attribution to the family Cyclophoridae; members of this superfamily are widespread today in Asia, thus indicating a long geological history in the region. This specimen constitutes the first confirmed and oldest record of soft-bodied preservation of a snail in Cretaceous amber.