Extinct
It took a good bit of searching before I found a picture of this snail's shell. I only found the one. This species has more rounds to their shell than other ramshorn snails. The side of the shell you cannot see in this picture is the side that shows why this type of snail is named ramshorn. Some of them really do look like the horns a ram might have. I wanted to show though how many rounds the shell of this species makes though. They were endemic to Lake Howe in Michigan. Unfortunately in 1905 it was decided to stock the lake with fish for sport fishing. Only 2 years later, the snail was seemingly gone, and none were found at a later survey either.
I didn't say I was going to do a mini-series for this week, but it has kind of happened and will go on into next week. I have been painting extinct animals. It seems like a good idea to do when I am so near to the end of this project. Ok, we are going to get a little biology nerdy right now, something I love but can make others zone out a bit. If you are old enough to have studied it, you might remember taxonomic ranks: Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. This project I have been dealing with the Animal Kingdom only, but might add plants next year. Within the Animal Kingdom are 35 Phyla, but 9 that include the majority of the animals. Of those 9, only 6 have a species that are listed as extinct. There are 815 species listed as extinct on the IUCN site I have been using this whole project. All but 4 of the species are in 3 phyla with the phylum Chordata containing the most at 410, Mollusca is next with 313, then Arthropoda which has 88 extinct species. So far this week I have painted 3 from the phylum Chordata, yesterday was Arthropoda, and today was from Mollusca. Because essentially the remaining 3 are different types of worms, I will be spacing them out with more from what I've already covered. The next three phyla may be a bit difficult for me to find information on, but I will try my best. I know, this is a lot of stuff that may not be very exciting but it explains what I am painting and why. Not all of the 815 species that are listed as extinct have gone extinct after 1900, so they would not be part of this project. Even still, there are way too many options for me to choose from.