#2849 - Gastrocopta strangei
Found in the spoilheap of a Greenhead Pony Ant nest - just one species in an entire superfamily of tiny air-breathing snails - those are grains of sand around it.
Also known as Pupa strangei (Chrysalis Snails being the common name for some of the species in the superfamily), Australbinula strangeana, Gastrocopta strangeana, and Gyrodaria strangeana. I haven't been able to find out who 'Strange' was.
The genus Gastrocopta was first described by Thomas Vernon Wollaston in 1878, and now has over 100 known species - many long extinct, and particularly diverse in the Miocene of Europe. The entire family is now extinct in Europe since the Pleistocene, with a single exception in the Northern Caucasus. One Gastrocoptid, Dentisphaera maxema, is known only from caves in northern Vietnam. Some species live in deserts.
Wollaston himself (b.1822–d.1878) was an English entomologist and conchologist who wrote extensively about the beetles and land snails of Madeira and elsewhere, and whose book ‘On the Variation of Species,’ predated Darwin's paper on the ‘Origin of Species’ by three years. The two men were well acquainted, but Darwin had a lot of biologist friends - the infamous Richard Owen being the only notable exception.
Uranquinty, NSW.