What's inside a clam? A retractable foot, a siphon for sucking up water, powerful muscles, and sometimes a pearl. And you thought oysters were fancy.

No, it doesn’t look anything like your foot or mine… but it serves practically the same purpose for the clam: transportation. Another interesting thing inside the clam’s shell is a pair of muscles ...

They live up to the name razor, not only in looks but also because they have a sharp-edged shell that can cut your foot if you step on it. It is even sometimes called a cut-throat clam.

Rings on the shell indicate how many years old a clam may be. ... As the clam grows, its wedge-shaped foot, which expands and contracts as it moves, becomes more important as a burrowing tool.

Another reason a clam might naturally open its shell is to stick out its foot and dig into the ground. Yes, you read that right: A clam has a foot. Of course, it isn’t quite like a human foot.

In a paper published in the November 6 issue of the journal Nature, Suzanne Dufour and Horst Felbeck show that a clam from a certain species can extend its foot (clams have only one foot) up to 30 ...

Scientists at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego, have documented what they are calling possibly the most extreme case of animal structure elongation ...