Basommatophora
suborder of molluscs
Basommatophora was a term that was previously used as a taxonomic informal group, a group of snails within the informal group Pulmonata, the air-breathing slugs and snails. According to the taxonomy of the Gastropoda (Bouchet & Rocroi, 2005), whenever monophyly has not been tested, or where a traditional taxon of gastropods has now been discovered to be paraphyletic or polyphyletic, the term "group" or "informal group" was used.
Basommatophora are known from the Carboniferous to the Recent periods.
Most of the families in this suborder are air-breathing freshwater snails. The three most abundant families in terms of number of species are, the Lymnaeidae (pond snails), the Planorbidae (ramshorn snails) and the Physidae (pouch or bubble snails). These are found in ponds, creeks, ditches, and shallow lakes nearly worldwide.
The Siphonariidae on the other hand are unusual in that they have secondarily returned to the sea, and are now sea snails, limpet-like marine gastropods which live in the rocky intertidal zone but which still breathe air and become active at low tide. The single species in the family Amphibolidae is archaic and retains an operculum. It lives at such a high tidal level that it could perhaps be considered semi-terrestrial. Members of the family Chilinidae are confined to temperate parts of South America, and the Latiidae are limpet-like and confined to New Zealand.
“Basommatophora” enters the record as suborder of molluscs. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Basommatophora, suborder and molluscs can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q587355. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2005.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Basommatophora” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.