Calotrophon
Calotrophon is a genus of sea snails, marine gastropod mollusks in the family Muricidae, the murex snails or rock snails.

Uncredited · 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
- MuricidaePBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Muricidae
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB, for Muricidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Muricidae
- Vision
- limitedPBDB, for Gastropoda
Time the record covers
At least 65 million years on record.
The record covers at least 66 Mya to 129 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 72.2 Mya to 11.7 ka.
99 occurrences of Calotrophon on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. 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
99 occurrences- Late Cretaceous1%
- Miocene26%
- Pliocene28%
- Pleistocene44%
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
14 formations
- Caloosahatchee Formation23
- Tamiami Formation · Okeechobee Group20
- Castilletes Formation17
- Springvale Formation6
- Jackson Bluff Formation · Alum Bluff Group3
- Bermont Formation2
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The named rock units Calotrophon has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 18 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Calotrophon and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Calotrophon and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
1,057 taxa- Typhis (Rugotyphis) floridanus26 sites
- Miltha caloosaensis25 sites
- Chicoreus (Chicoreus) floridanus19 sites
- Subpterynotus textilis17 sites
- Dermomurex (Dermomurex) engonatus15 sites
- Anadara (Caloosarca) crassicosta14 sites
- Aspella senex14 sites
- Murexiella macgintyi14 sites
- Anomia simplex13 sites
- Murexiella (Murexiella) shilohensis13 sites
- Olivella mutica12 sites
- Cerithium11 sites
- Naticarius canrena11 sites
- Vokesimurex rubidus11 sites
- Anadara10 sites
- Calyptraea centralis10 sites
- Turritella10 sites
- Murexiella (Murexiella) macgintyi faceta9 sites
- Acteocina canaliculata8 sites
- Arcopagia fausta8 sites
- Arcopsis adamsi8 sites
- Busycon contrarium8 sites
- Crepidula plana8 sites
- Marginella8 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 66 sites for Calotrophon, and this reads all of them. 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
14 references- Cenozoic Muricidae of the western Atlantic region. Part VII - Calotrophon and Attiliosa54
- Neogene molluscs, shallow marine paleoenvironments, and chronostratigraphy of the Guajira Peninsula, Colombia18
- Miocene and Pliocene mollusks from Trinidad6
- Neogene Biostratigraphy of the Charlotte Harbor Area in Southwestern Florida6
- Unpublished census data from Atlantic coastal plain and circum-Caribbean Neogene assemblages and taxonomic opinions3
- Pliocene Mollusca of Southern Florida3
- Mollusca: Shoal River Formation (Middle Miocene2
- Resilience of marine invertebrate communities during the early Cenozoic hyperthermals1
- Unpublished notes on Caribbean collection of Jack and Winifred Gibson-Smith, Naturhistorisches Museum Basel1
- Mollusca: Fort Thompson Formation (Late Pleistocene)1
- Petuch and Roberts, 20071
- Preliminary biostratigraphy and molluscan fauna of the Goose Creek Limestone of eastern South Carolina1
Each of the 99 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. 2 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 Calotrophon
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- not stated by the source
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
No 3D scan of Calotrophon was found in MorphoSource and Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access was 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, “Calotrophon”
- 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 itMuricidae through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Hertlein and Strong 1951