Object of the Week: The Immortal Snail

A mysterious stranger offers you £1 billion, but there’s a catch - an immortal, super-intelligent snail appears and will chase you down for the rest of your life, and if it ever touches you - you die. Would you take the deal?

I love asking stupid theoretical questions like this - they always spark a great discussion, with people throwing out the craziest ideas - and during a discussion about The Immortal Snail on a recent night out reminded me of one of my favourite stories of natural history.

In 1846, the British Museum were sent a specimen of Helix desertorum - today known as Eremina desertorum - from Egypt. If you don’t know what an Eremina desertorum is - for shame, considering how simple and catchy the name is - it is a snail. I would tell you more but I must have missed that day in snail school.

Figure 1: Eremina desertorum in all its snaily goodness. Photo by Ron Frumkin.

Never one to turn down a treasure from abroad, the British Museum accepted the dead specimen, glued it onto an index card, labelled it and then filed it away. Amidst the museum’s vast collection, the specimen must have gone largely unnoticed and forgotten (the poor thing). Four years later, however, someone pulled out the index card and noticed a slight discolouring on the paper around where the shell’s opening had been glued down. This aroused suspicions - what could have caused the strange markings on this specific card only? Further investigation revealed the strangest of answers - the snail was alive.

Figure 2: author's artistic interpretation of the moment of reawakening

When the Museum had received the poor chap, they had assumed that the sender had boiled and prepared the shell. In actuality the snail, accustomed to the deserts of Egypt where long naps were needed to endure droughts, had entered what is known as a state of torpor - essentially a very deep sleep in which little if any food or water is needed. One can only imagine how confused the slimy fella was - one minute they were enjoying life, snailing it up in Egypt, and the next they were trapped to a piece of card in London for four years.

After being separated from its papery house (or tomb?), the snail was given a warm bath and, to the surprise of all, almost immediately started to move around as if nothing had happened at all - as if they’d been asleep for a few hours instead of a few years. While torpor was known about at the time, this case was unique, both in taking place entirely within the British Museum which made it easy to authenticate, and in length with the writer Grant Allen comparing the snail’s feat to the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. (As an aside, I highly recommend Grant Allen’s charming account of this whole episode which can be found here).

Now perhaps the most famous snail of all time, the heavy sleeper had the privilege of having a sketch taken of them (or, as Allen puts it, they ‘sat for their portrait to an eminent zoological artist’), and was transferred to a much roomier glass jar, where it carefully looked after and given ample cabbage leaves. It enjoyed this comfortable life - even taking the liberty of having an 8-month nap at one point - for another two years, before finally passing in 1852.

Figure 3: the Immortal Snail themselves - woodcut from a drawing by A. N. Waterhouse, from Samuel Woodward’s A Manual of the Mollusca (1851)

Rest in peace, immortal snail.

Ethan Cowie is currently a student on the MA Museum Studies program at the University of Leicester.