extinct genus of Ordovician gastropods (snails) found as fossils and useful for stratigraphic correlations (the Ordovician Period lasted from 505 to 438 million years ago). The shell is distinctively coiled and easily recognized. Maclurites also had an operculum, or second shell, that covered the aperture of the larger body shell. Maclurites is characteristic of a group of early gastropods that first appeared in the Late Cambrian and became extinct at the end of the Ordovician.