The origins of flora and fauna that are only found in Ireland and Iberia, but which are absent from intervening countries, is one of the enduring questions of biogeography. As Southern French, Iberian and Irish populations of the land snail Cepaea nemoralis sometimes have a similar shell character, we used mitochondrial phylogenies to begin to understand if there is a shared "Lusitanian" histor...

The complete sequence (14,130 bp) of the mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) of the land snail Albinaria coerulea was determined. It contains 13 protein, two rRNA and 22 tRNA genes. Twenty-four of these genes are encoded by one and 13 genes by the other strand. The gene arrangement shares almost no similarities with that of two other molluscs for which the complete gene content and arrangement are known,...