Yesterday I attended a showing of a movie put on by a non-profit organization called Sustainable Driftless. The name of the movie was Spirit Of The Driftless; Preserving Our Legacy. Driftless refers to a landscape from Hastings, MN to south of Dubuque, Iowa, including parts of Wisconsin and Illinois, that wasn't covered by the latest glacier. I watched the movie with 40 other people at a local lodge. The movie talks about the unique and beautiful landscape that is the driftless region. Here we have unique land forms. One speaker told us about endangered ancient snails. Their first record of them was in fossils. But then one live snail was found in Iowa. They kept looking and eventually found 37 groups of these rare snails. The snails, about as big as your pinky fingernail, are found on the north facing slopes. Here the rocky ledges of limestone, marble, and gypsum break apart and fall down the bluff piling up on itself. This is the karst region. When a sinkhole forms in the flat land on top of the bluff, moisture and air gather in the sinkhole. In winter ice forms in big sheaths. In summer the ice recedes but does not disappear keeping the area cool. That is where these Iowa Pleistocene snails live. They like it cold. They like this rare habitat. Not all 37 of the snails habitats are protected by the Driftless Area National Refuge but 21 are. I thought it was bizarre to first learn about a creature by studying fossils and then finding a live one.
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