Jo Hatty

Security footage at the Galveston Marine Heritage Museum showed nothing unusual until Tuesday morning. A hermit crab - later identified as a wild Coenobita clypeatus that had crawled in through a basement drain - abandoned its shell on the floor and climbed into a 400-year-old Spanish colonial conch on the invertebrate display. The shell was valued at $11,200. Curators couldn't remove the crab without risking damage to the artifact. A marine biologist spent six hours coaxing it out using warmed saltwater and a slightly larger shell from a pet store. The crab rejected the pet store shell twice. It finally accepted a third option - the original shell it came in with. He just wanted to try it on, the biologist told local news, completely straight-faced.