Charybdis feriata
Charybdis feriata, the crucifix crab, is a species of swimming crab in the family Portunidae. It is found in the tropical and subtropical Indo-Pacific region.

Palmfly · 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
- crucifix crabPBDB
- Sits inside
- CharybdisPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Decapoda
- Life habit
- semi-infaunalPBDB, for Portunoidea
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Malacostraca
- Vision
- well-developedPBDB, for Malacostraca
Time the record covers
At most 645 thousand years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 774 ka and 129 ka, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
2 occurrences of Charybdis feriata on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. 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
2 occurrences- Pleistocene100%
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.
Charybdis feriata and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Charybdis feriata and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
2 taxa- Galene stipata1 site
- Macrophthalmus (Mareotis) wilfordi1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 2 sites for Charybdis feriata, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too.
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 2 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 content1
Picture of Charybdis feriata
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Palmfly
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Charybdis feriata 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
- 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 itCharybdis through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1758)