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March 9, 2021 at 6:00 am When Isabel Hyman heads out in coming weeks to the wilds of northern New South Wales, she’s worried about what she won’t find. Fifteen years ago, the malacologist or mollusk scientist with the Australian Museum made an incredible discovery among the limestone outcrops there: a tiny, 3-millimeter-long snail, with a ribbed, dark golden-brown shell, that was new to science. Subsequently named after her husband, Hugh Palethorpe, Palethorpe’s pinwheel snail ( Rhophodon palethorpei) “is only known from a single location, at the Kunderang Brook limestone outcrops in Werrikimbe National Park,” she says. Now it may become known for a different, more devastating distinction: It is one of hundreds of species that experts fear have been pushed close to, or right over, the precipice of extinction by the wildfires that blazed across more than 10 million hectares of southeastern Australia in the summer of 2019–2020. ....