Conus tessulatus
Conus tessulatus, common name the tessellated cone, is a species of sea snail, a marine gastropod mollusk in the family Conidae, the cone snails and their allies.

No machine-readable author provided. Clmiadfl assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public Domain · 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
- ConusPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Conidae
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB, for Conidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Conidae
- Vision
- limitedPBDB, for Gastropoda
Time the record covers
At least 11 million years on record.
The record covers at least 11.63 Mya to 129 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 15.98 Mya to 11.7 ka.
8 occurrences of Conus tessulatus on record, most of them in the Miocene. 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
8 occurrences- Miocene63%
- Pliocene13%
- Pleistocene25%
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
3 formations
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Conus tessulatus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 2 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Conus tessulatus and its relatives
MioceneWhere Conus tessulatus and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
The Paleobiology Database records no fossil sites for Conus tessulatus, so there is nothing to compare it with.
Entered from
4 references- Milankovitch 41 000-year cycles in lithofaciesa and molluscan content in the tropical Middle Miocene Nyalindung Formation, Jawa, Indonesia4
- Cenozoic fossil mollusks from Western Pacific Islands; Gastropods (Volutidae through Terebridae)2
- Pleistocene mollusc assemblage in the slightly raised atoll lagoon of Niau (Tuamotu, French Polynesia)1
- Late Pleistocene molluscan assemblages from the coral reefs of the Kenya coast1
Each of the 8 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 doi.org. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Conus tessulatus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- No machine-readable author provided. Clmiadfl assumed (based on copyright claims).
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Conus tessulatus 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
- 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 itConus through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Born 1778