'Back From the Dead' Ancient Clam Refuses to Go Extinct

Back in the 1930s, paleontologist George Willett was the first to describe the fossilized bivalve – a tiny, 10-millimeter mollusk discovered by amateur shell collector Edna Cook in a collection of fossils hailing from an area in Los Angeles’s Baldwin Hills.

A tiny luminous clam that was believed to have gone extinct around 40,000 years ago has suddenly been extraordinarily discovered alive by a marine ecologist in California.

The bivalve, roughly 11 millimeters in length, is named Cymatioa cooki, and was previously identified from its fossil illustrations. However, the attentive eye of Jeff Goddard, scouring the tidal pools on a beach not far from Santa Barbara in autumn 2018, caught sight of something odd and previously unseen. These were two translucent white clams whose shells measured no more than 10 millimeters in length.

It was after they thrust forward a white-striped foot outstripping the length of their shell that the researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, had a suspicion that he had seen something like it somewhere. Goddard sent photographs of the clams to a colleague of his, Paul Valentich-Scott, malacology curator at the Natural History Museum of Santa Barbara. The expert seemed no less puzzled, as he tried to figure out what it was. In the wake of a spate of failed efforts to come across the sneaky clams again, in 2019 the two scientists snapped up a live specimen of the elusive bivalve. Once they compared it with fossil records, it struck them that it appeared to hail back to a bivalve chronicled in the 1930s by George Willett.

Meet the Cymatioa cooki, a species of clam that was believed to be extinct for 40,000 years but was just found alive on the coast of California, only about 3 of them have been found. They are 11 millimeters in length and the only proof of it existing before was a fossil. pic.twitter.com/SkEi1VsfOs

— Cadet // MINOR!! (@cadetbeepboop) November 16, 2022

The species had been named by the paleontologist after amateur shell collector Edna Cook, who unearthed the mini-clams in a 30,000-strong collection of shells and suspected they were special.

“Once I physically saw that original specimen that Willett had used for his description, I knew right away” that the live clam was the same species, Valentich-Scott told the media.

As they wondered how the ancient clams had reached this particular area, the scientists speculated that a warm water current had possibly carried them from their typical habitat farther south.