Cowielepis
Cowielepis is an extinct genus of jawless fish in the class Anaspida. It is from the Cowie Harbour fish bed of Stonehaven, Scotland, which age is considered as the Silurian, or Early Devonian (Lochkovian).

Nobu Tamura Email:nobu.tamura@yahoo.com http://spinops.blogspot.com/ http://paleoexhibit.blogspot.com/ · CC BY-SA 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
- BirkeniidaPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Chordata
Time the record covers
At most 6.2 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 432.9 Mya and 426.7 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
2 occurrences of Cowielepis on record, most of them in the Silurian. 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- Silurian100%
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
1 formation
- Cowie Formation · Stonehaven Group2
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The named rock units Cowielepis has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Cowielepis and its relatives
SilurianWhere Cowielepis and its relatives were recorded in the Silurian.
Found in the same rock
24 taxa- Pneumodesmus newmani2 sites
- Albadesmus almondi1 site
- Ambitisporites avitus1 site
- Ambitisporites dilutus1 site
- Archaeozonotriletes chulus1 site
- Artemopyra brevicosta1 site
- Artemopyra sp.1 site
- Cheilotetras caledonica1 site
- Cowiedesmus eroticopodus1 site
- Cymbosporites sp.1 site
- Dictyocaris1 site
- Dyadospora murusattenuata1 site
- Dyadospora murusdensa1 site
- Hemicyclaspis1 site
- Hispanaediscus lamontii1 site
- Hispanaediscus verrucatus1 site
- Hispanaediscus wenlockensis1 site
- Laevolancis divellomedium1 site
- Laevolancis plicata1 site
- Nanahughmilleria norvegica1 site
- Pseudodyadospora petasus1 site
- Synorisporites spp.1 site
- Tetrahedraletes medinensis1 site
- Traquairaspis campbelli1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 2 sites for Cowielepis, 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
2 references- Age of the basal ‘Lower Old Red Sandstone’ Stonehaven Group of Scotland: The oldest reported air-breathing land animal is Silurian (late Wenlock) in age1
- A new anapsid fish from the middle Silurian Cowie Harbour fish bed of Stonehaven, Scotland1
Each 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 doi.org. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Cowielepis
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Nobu Tamura Email:nobu.tamura@yahoo.com http://spinops.blogspot.com/ http://paleoexhibit.blogspot.com/
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Cowielepis 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, “Cowielepis”
- 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 itBirkeniida through timeFormations of the SilurianThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Blom 2008