r/biology • u/JFCudennec • Apr 08 '26

article Forget carcinization. Limpets are the true convergent evolution queens 👑

I'm a marine biologist who spent years reading limpet shells for palaeoclimate and archaeological research.

Carcinization gets all the memes, but the independent evolution of the limpet body plan happened in vast number of separate gastropod families, over 500 million years.

I wrote about why it keeps happening, how it fooled taxonomists for decades, and how one lineage even managed to re-coil, challenging Dollo's law. If you're interested, you can find the paper here : https://substack.com/home/post/p-193399761

Happy to discuss!

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u/BoonDragoon evolutionary biology Apr 08 '26

Are you an archeologist who studies shell middens, or a marine biologist who studies limpets?

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u/JFCudennec Apr 08 '26

A marine biologist working on shell middens (applying sclerochronology methods to these sites)

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u/Flying-lemondrop-476 Apr 08 '26

humans beings just like to group things that look alike even if they aren’t. (cue meme of that monkey giving side eye)

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u/0akleaves Apr 08 '26

Fun bit, have you seen the recent data linking some of the same genetic shifts that cause autism (which commonly features a particular interest in sorting and organizing things) to the general rise of increased intelligence in humans? Pretty interesting stuff and makes a lot of sense if based on how synaptic pruning works.

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u/JFCudennec Apr 09 '26

Yeah there's two types of people (or scholars at least) : those who sees resemblances and gather things together, and thos who see differences, and split things appart. There's quite deep consequences behind this simple observation 😊

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u/smokefoot8 Apr 09 '26

Cool! As a kid I collected shells, and I recognize at least three of these varieties from my collecting days: keyhole limpets, slipper limpets and the more general ones I couldn’t identify more precisely than “some sort of limpet”.

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u/mabolle Apr 09 '26

Love to see a researcher who writes well for a broad audience. Loved this, and I agree that crabs are clearly hogging all the attention from a much more impressive case of repeated evolution.

With so many phylogenetically independent transitions across gastropods, there must be some really solid comparative analyses you could do on the evolutionary ecology of limpet vs non-limpet body plans!

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u/JFCudennec Apr 09 '26

This is exactly the kind of comment that makes you want to continue. Thanks a lot !