The short answer was yes – that pretty little shell in his hand was likely home to a very dangerous snail. Many Reddit users quickly recognized the shell as belonging to a venomous cone snail.

Learn about our Editorial Policies. These findings inspired Ho Yan Yeung, a postdoctoral researcher in Helena Safavi-Hemami’s group at the University of Utah, to investigate whether cone snails ...

A couple of months later he saw a picture of a similar shell online and was shocked to discover that he had held in his hands a cone snail, one of the world’s most poisonous animals.