There are more than a few repulsion stories and film about the breakthrough of some unusual , presumptively lifeless artifact that springtime to life sentence , usually to work mayhem ( see : The Relic , The Thing , The Mummy ) . Something like this actually fall out once in the veridical world — except it did n’t turn into a bloodshed and was actually passably adorable .
In 1846 , a lawyer donate a clustering of snail shells he had hoard in Egypt and Greece to the British Museum in London . Two of these belong to the “ escargot of the desert,”Ereminadesertorum(formerlyHelixdesertorum ) . Curators fix the shell to pieces of composition board with some adhesive , labeled and dated them and added them to the museum ’s shellfish collection .
Four years later , zoologist William Baird was examining some other specimen in the same case when he noticed a “ thin glassy - wait screening ” had distribute over the opening of one of the desert escargot shells . The covering was anepiphragm , a mucus tissue layer that some snails build to keep themselves from dry out . It appear to Baird to have been late formed , leading him — as science writerGrant Allenput itin 1889 — to “ the suspicion that perhaps a know animal might be temporarily immured within that papery tomb . ”
Bairdunstuckthe shell from its cardboard tablet and placed it in a basin of tepid weewee . After a few moments , a head pop out of the carapace , and the snail , quite live , start to move around . Baird moved the snail to a glass jar and fed it a diet of chou leaves , which hesaid , it preferred over boodle or “ any other sort of nutrient I have yet tried . ” He even gave the snail some troupe after its long , lonely dormancy , and locate another escargot , Helix hortensis , in its jar . The distich , he wrote , “ seem to live quite harmoniously together . ”
As the snail adjusted to active life again , it became a minor celebrity and sat for aportraitby the museum ’s zoological creative person for inclusion in abook on mollusks . It continued to live under Baird ’s maintenance and spend most of its fourth dimension repairing the sassing of its shell , which had become broken before it came to London . About a year afterwards , it became torpid again , anddied(for indisputable this time ) in 1852 .
