Plants & CreaturesGreek → English
Pteropod
/ˈtɛrəpɒd/noun
A small swimming sea snail whose foot has flattened into a pair of wing-like flaps.
The Greek roots
πτερόν
pterón
wing, feather
πούς, ποδός
poús, podós
foot
Literally: “wing foot”
The story of the word
Sailors call them sea butterflies. Cuvier grouped them in the early nineteenth century, and the Greek name records what struck him: the crawling foot of a snail turned into wings. It is the same foot that walks under a gastropod and the same wing that hangs off a pterodactyl. They now carry a weight nobody in 1800 could have foreseen, because their thin aragonite shells begin to dissolve as the ocean takes up carbon dioxide.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → scientific Latin → English
- First recorded
- 19th century
Same family
pterodactylhelicoptergastropodtripodpodium
In a sentence
A net haul off Svalbard came up thick with pteropods, each one no bigger than a lentil.
Pteropod shells from the survey showed pitting along the whorl.