Pyramidula chorismenostoma is a species

Species

In biology, a species is one of the basic units of biological classification and a taxonomic rank. A species is often defined as a group of organisms capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring. While in many cases this definition is adequate, more precise or differing measures are...

 of very small air-breathing land snail

Snail

Snail is a common name applied to most of the members of the molluscan class Gastropoda that have coiled shells in the adult stage. When the word is used in its most general sense, it includes sea snails, land snails and freshwater snails. The word snail without any qualifier is however more often...

, a terrestrial

Terrestrial animal

Terrestrial animals are animals that live predominantly or entirely on land , as compared with aquatic animals, which live predominantly or entirely in the water , or amphibians, which rely on a combination of aquatic and terrestrial habitats...

 pulmonate gastropod mollusk or micromollusk

Micromollusk

A micromollusk is a descriptive term for a shelled mollusk which is extremely small, even at full adult size. The word is usually, but not exclusively, applied to marine mollusks, although in addition, numerous species of land snails and freshwater mollusks also reach adult size at very small...

 in the family Pyramidulidae

Pyramidulidae

Pyramidulidae is a family of small air-breathing land snails, terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusks in the superfamily Pupilloidea.-Anatomy:In this family, the number of haploid chromosomes lies between 26 and 30 ....

.

Shell description

The normal condition of the shell

Gastropod shell

The gastropod shell is a shell which is part of the body of a gastropod or snail, one kind of mollusc. The gastropod shell is an external skeleton or exoskeleton, which serves not only for muscle attachment, but also for protection from predators and from mechanical damage...

 of this species is scalarid, i.e. the whorl

Whorl (mollusc)

A whorl is a single, complete 360° revolution or turn in the spiral growth of a mollusc shell. A spiral configuration of the shell is found in of numerous gastropods, but it is also found in shelled cephalopods including Nautilus, Spirula and the large extinct subclass of cephalopods known as the...

s of the shell are not attached to one another. This shell type is unique among the non-marine malacofauna of Europe.

The width of the shell is up to 2.2 mm, the height is up to 3.1 mm.

Distribution

This species occurs in countries and islands including:

• Greece: approximately the southern 2/3 of Greece, Crete
  Crete
  Crete is the largest and most populous of the Greek islands, the fifth largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, and one of the thirteen administrative regions of Greece. It forms a significant part of the economy and cultural heritage of Greece while retaining its own local cultural traits...
  
  , and the Aegean islands
  Aegean Islands
  The Aegean Islands are the group of islands in the Aegean Sea, with mainland Greece to the west and north and Turkey to the east; the island of Crete delimits the sea to the south, those of Rhodes, Karpathos and Kasos to the southeast...
  
  .
• Western Turkey

Further reading

• Mylonas M. 1982. New data on the taxonomy and distribution de Pyramidula rupestris chorismenostoma (Blanc). Malacologia, 22(1-2): 439-440.