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” history. Although much of Europe contains snails with A and D lineages, by far the majority of Irish individuals have a lineage, C, that in mainland Europe was only found in a restricted region of the Eastern Pyrenees. A past extinction of lineage C in the rest of Europe cannot be ruled out, but as there is a more than 8000 year continuous record of Cepaea fossils in Ireland, the species has long been a food source in the Pyrenees, and the Garonne river that flanks the Pyrenees is an ancient human route to the Atlantic, then we suggest that the unusual distribution of the C lineage is most easily explained by the movements of Mesolithic humans. If other Irish species have a similarly cryptic Lusitanian element, then this raises the possibility of a more widespread and significant pattern.

Existing data on the phylogeography of European taxa of steppic provenance suggests that species were widely distributed during glacial periods but underwent range contraction and fragmentation during interglacials into “warm-stage refugia.” Among the steppe-related invertebrates that have been examined, the majority has been insects, but data on the phylogeography of snails is wholly missing. To begin to fill this gap, phylogeographic and niche modeling studies on the presumed steppic snail Caucasotachea vindobonensis were conducted. Surprisingly, reconstruction of ancestral areas suggests that extant C. vindobonensis probably originated in the Balkans and survived there during the Late Pleistocene glaciations, with a more recent colonization of the Carpatho-Pannonian and the Ponto-Caspian regions. In the Holocene, C. vindobonensis colonized between the Sudetes and the Carpathians to the north, where its recent and current distribution may have been facilitated by anthropogenic translocations. Together, these data suggest a possible non-steppic origin of C. vindobonensis. Further investigation may reveal the extent to which the steppic snail assemblages consist partly of Holocene newcomers.

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