Oreohelicidae is a
family
Family (from la, familia) is a Social group, group of people related either by consanguinity (by recognized birth) or Affinity (law), affinity (by marriage or other relationship). The purpose of the family is to maintain the well-being of its ...
of small to medium-sized air-breathing
land snails,
terrestrial
Terrestrial refers to things related to land or the planet Earth.
Terrestrial may also refer to:
* Terrestrial animal, an animal that lives on land opposed to living in water, or sometimes an animal that lives on or near the ground, as opposed to ...
pulmonate
Pulmonata or pulmonates, is an informal group (previously an order, and before that a subclass) of snails and slugs characterized by the ability to breathe air, by virtue of having a pallial lung instead of a gill, or gills. The group includ ...
gastropod
The gastropods (), commonly known as snails and slugs, belong to a large taxonomic class of invertebrates within the phylum Mollusca called Gastropoda ().
This class comprises snails and slugs from saltwater, from freshwater, and from land. T ...
mollusk
Mollusca is the second-largest phylum of invertebrate animals after the Arthropoda, the members of which are known as molluscs or mollusks (). Around 85,000 extant species of molluscs are recognized. The number of fossil species is e ...
s in the superfamily
Punctoidea
Punctoidea is a superfamily of air-breathing land snails and slugs, terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusks in the informal group Sigmurethra.
Taxonomy
The superfamily Punctoidea is classified within the clade Stylommatophora within the cl ...
(according to the
taxonomy of the Gastropoda by Bouchet & Rocroi, 2005).
Anatomy
In this family, the number of
haploid chromosome
A chromosome is a long DNA molecule with part or all of the genetic material of an organism. In most chromosomes the very long thin DNA fibers are coated with packaging proteins; in eukaryotic cells the most important of these proteins are ...
s lies between 31 and 35 (according to the values in this table).
[Barker G. M.: Gastropods on Land: ''Phylogeny, Diversity and Adaptive Morphology''. in Barker G. M. (ed.): ]
The biology of terrestrial molluscs
'. CABI Publishing, Oxon, UK, 2001, . 1-146, cited pages: 139 and 142.
Oreohelix, the type genus, is ovoviviparous.
Radiocentrum, a subgenus of Oreohelix, is oviparous(Tompa, 1979). The group as a whole generally lacks any apertural barriers or teeth and displays wide variety of shell morphologies (Burke & Leonard 2014).
Genera
The family Oreohelicidae has no subfamilies.
The type genus is ''
Oreohelix''
Pilsbry
Henry Augustus Pilsbry (7 December 1862 – 26 October 1957) was an American biologist, malacologist and carcinologist, among other areas of study. He was a dominant presence in many fields of invertebrate taxonomy for the better part of a centu ...
, 1904.
Genera within the family Oreohelicidae include:
* ''
Oreohelix'' Pilsbry, 1904
* ''
Radiocentrum'' Pilsbry, 1905
References
External links
*
{{Oreohelicidae-stub