A retractable foot, a siphon for sucking up water, powerful muscles, and, sometimes, a pearl ... a clam. Like oysters and mussels, clams are bivalves, a kind of mollusk that's encased in a shell ...

“I thought it was a shell or something like that, but then looked and it was this little purple thing.” The clam that it came ... in 5,000 quahogs creates a pearl. Furthermore, due to the ...

The oyster or mussel slowly secretes layers of aragonite and conchiolin, materials that also make up its shell. This creates a material called nacre, also known as mother-of-pearl, which encases the ...

Among the millions of bivalve molluscs in the Museum's collections, one specimen stands out: a large oyster shell, donated to the Museum in 1886 and containing a peculiar pearl. Rather than a ...