Acteonidae
Acteonidae, common name the "barrel bubble snails", is a family of small sea snails, marine gastropod mollusks of the informal group Lower Heterobranchia.

Yasunori Kano, Bastian Brenzinger, Alexander Nützel, Nerida G. Wilson & Michael Schrödl · CC BY 4.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- ActeonoideaPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB
- Vision
- limitedPBDB, for Gastropoda
Time the record covers
At least 184 million years on record.
The record covers at least 184.2 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 192.9 Mya to 0 Mya.
1,315 occurrences of Acteonidae on record, most of them in the Late Cretaceous. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
1,315 occurrences- Early Jurassicunder 1%
- Middle Jurassicunder 1%
- Early Cretaceous7%
- Late Cretaceous29%
- Paleocene12%
- Eocene23%
- Oligocene4%
- Miocene14%
- Pliocene4%
- Pleistocene6%
- Holoceneunder 1%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
258 formations
- Cook Mountain Formation · Claiborne Group44
- Ripley Formation · Selma Group39
- Moodys Branch Formation · Jackson Group37
- Kincaid Formation · Midway Group36
- Providence Formation26
- Guinea Corn Formation24
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The named rock units Acteonidae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 234 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 243 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Acteonidae and its relatives
Late CretaceousWhere Acteonidae and its relatives were recorded in the Late Cretaceous.
Found in the same rock
2,331 taxa- Acteon80 sites
- Turritella78 sites
- Nuculana68 sites
- Dentalium63 sites
- Cadulus56 sites
- Corbula56 sites
- Cymbophora48 sites
- Turritella trilira45 sites
- Euspira rectilabrum41 sites
- Serpula40 sites
- Vertebrata40 sites
- Ostrea37 sites
- Tellina37 sites
- Tornatellaea36 sites
- Gastropoda35 sites
- Naticidae35 sites
- Turritella vertebroides34 sites
- Crenella serica33 sites
- Paladmete cancellaria32 sites
- Syncyclonema32 sites
- Anomia argentaria30 sites
- Striarca30 sites
- Bryozoa29 sites
- Crassatella29 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 817 sites for Acteonidae, and this reads 240 of them. Of that, one read hit the database's own return limit, so every count below is a floor rather than a total. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
298 references- Resilience of marine invertebrate communities during the early Cenozoic hyperthermals88
- Cretaceous Actaeonellid Gastropods from the Western Hemisphere88
- Die Fauna des marinen Miozäns von Kevelaer (Niederrhein). Band 4 Gastropoda ab Mitridae51
- Catalogue of the Paleocene and Eocene mollusca of the southern and eastern United States. Part 1. Pelecypoda, Amphineura, Pteropoda, Scaphopoda and Cephalopoda47
- The Molluscan Fauna of the Alum Bluff Group of Florida43
- Faunal dynamics of juvenile gastropods and associated organisms across the Valanginian transgression-regression cycle in central Poland38
- Upper Cretaceous (Maestrichtian) larger invertebrates from the Haustator bilira Assemblage Zone in the Atlantic Coastal Plain with further data for the East Gulf33
- Upper Cretaceous (Maestrichtian) Mollusca from the Haustator bilira Assemblage Zone in the East Gulf Coastal Plain27
- Archeogastropoda, Mesogastropoda and stratigraphy of the Ripley, Owl Creek, and Prairie Bluff Formations27
- Faunal stability and environmental change in the middle Eocene Gulf Coastal Plain (PhD Thesis, Harvard University)25
- The larger invertebrate fossils of the Navarro group of Texas23
- Upper Cretaceous (Maestrichtian) larger invertebrate Fossils from the Haustator bilira Assemblage Zone in the west gulf Coastal Plain22
Each of the 1,315 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. 286 further references are not listed. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Acteonidae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Yasunori Kano, Bastian Brenzinger, Alexander Nützel, Nerida G. Wilson & Michael Schrödl
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Acteonidae was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Acteonidae”
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itActeonoidea through timeFormations of the Late CretaceousThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. d'Orbigny 1835