A golden snail with a foot clad in iron scales seems like a creature from science fiction. But in a few remote spots of the Indian Ocean these snails are very real.
“It looks like an armoured knight crawling around on the deep-sea floor,” says Julia Sigwart, a biologist at Frankfurt’s Senckenberg Research Institute and one of the only people to have seen a living scaly-foot snail (Chrysomallon squamiferum), also known as a sea pangolin.
