Busycon
Searched as Busycon tampaense perizonatum. The Paleobiology Database treats Busycon as the accepted name.
Busycon is a genus of very large edible sea snails in the subfamily Busyconinae. These snails are commonly known in the United States as whelks or Busycon whelks. Less commonly they are loosely, and somewhat misleadingly, called "conchs".
H. Zell · CC BY-SA 3.0 · 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- Also called
- whelkPBDB
- Sits inside
- BusyconinaePBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Neogastropoda
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB, for Neogastropoda
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Neogastropoda
- Vision
- limitedPBDB, for Gastropoda
Time the record covers
At most 6.9 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 27.3 Mya and 20.45 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
3 occurrences of Busycon on record, most of them in the Oligocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group, and the chart stops with its fossils rather than at the present. 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
3 occurrencesThese 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
1 formation
- Arcadia Formation · Hawthorn Group3
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The named rock units Busycon has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Busycon and its relatives
OligoceneWhere Busycon and its relatives were recorded in the Oligocene.
Found in the same rock
1,617 taxa- Anadara27 sites
- Crepidula plana24 sites
- Nucula (Nucula) proxima24 sites
- Crepidula fornicata20 sites
- Nuculana acuta19 sites
- Abra aequalis18 sites
- Parvilucina multistriata18 sites
- Trachycardium18 sites
- Anomia simplex15 sites
- Mulinia lateralis15 sites
- Nassarius (Uzita)15 sites
- Nuculana15 sites
- Turritella15 sites
- Calyptraea centralis14 sites
- Cancellaria14 sites
- Crassinella14 sites
- Crassinella lunulata14 sites
- Neverita duplicatus14 sites
- Yoldia14 sites
- Anadara (Larkinia) transversa13 sites
- Diplodonta13 sites
- Ensis directus13 sites
- Mitrella13 sites
- Nucula13 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 109 sites for Busycon, and this reads all 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
1 referenceEach of the 3 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. Each entry links to the Paleobiology Database's own record for the work.
Media and terms
Media content2
Picture of Busycon
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- H. Zell
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
3D model
- Source
- Sketchfab
- Licence
- CC0 Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
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, “Busycon”
- 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 itBusyconinae through timeFormations of the OligoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Röding 1798