Cuspidariidae
Cuspidariidae is a family of small marine bivalve molluscs in the superfamily Cuspidarioidea.

George Brettingham Sowerby II · 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
- CuspidarioideaPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB
- Life habit
- infaunalPBDB
- Motility
- facultatively mobilePBDB
- Vision
- blindPBDB, for Bivalvia
Time the record covers
At least 236 million years on record.
The record covers at least 237 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 239.48 Mya to 0 Mya.
416 occurrences of Cuspidariidae on record, most of them in the Late Cretaceous. 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
416 occurrences- Middle Triassicunder 1%
- Late Triassic1%
- Early Jurassic2%
- Middle Jurassicunder 1%
- Late Jurassic1%
- Early Cretaceousunder 1%
- Late Cretaceous33%
- Paleocene10%
- Eocene13%
- Oligocene7%
- Miocene13%
- Pliocene11%
- Pleistocene5%
- Holoceneunder 1%
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
137 formations
- Corsicana Marl Formation20
- Reklaw Formation · Claiborne Group16
- Woodbine Formation14
- Kincaid Formation · Midway Group14
- Cercado Formation14
- Bowden Formation · Coastal Group12
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The named rock units Cuspidariidae has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 113 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 72 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Cuspidariidae and its relatives
Late CretaceousWhere Cuspidariidae and its relatives were recorded in the Late Cretaceous.
Found in the same rock
3,164 taxa- Cuspidaria102 sites
- Nuculana89 sites
- Cymbophora43 sites
- Striarca41 sites
- Corbula40 sites
- Syncyclonema40 sites
- Dentalium38 sites
- Modiolus38 sites
- Cucullaea36 sites
- Nucula36 sites
- Ostrea36 sites
- Limopsis34 sites
- Turritella33 sites
- Crassatella vadosa32 sites
- Malletia32 sites
- Anomia argentaria31 sites
- Caryocorbula29 sites
- Crassatella29 sites
- Crenella serica28 sites
- Vetericardiella28 sites
- Naticidae27 sites
- Nucula percrassa27 sites
- Anomia26 sites
- Exogyra (Exogyra) costata26 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 280 sites for Cuspidariidae, and this reads 240 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
140 references- Unpublished data on Cretaceous-Paleocene molluscan assemblages37
- Neogene paleontology in the northern Dominican Republic: 17. The familes Cuspidariidae and Verticordiidae (Mollusca: Bivalvia)20
- Resilience of marine invertebrate communities during the early Cenozoic hyperthermals19
- Upper Cretaceous (Maestrichtian) larger invertebrate Fossils from the Haustator bilira Assemblage Zone in the west gulf Coastal Plain14
- Larger invertebrate fossils of the Woodbine formation (Cenomanian) of Texas14
- The first 2 million years after the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary in east Texas: Rate and paleoecology of the molluscan recovery11
- Lower Danian bivalves, Stevns Klint, Denmark; continuity across the K/T boundary10
- Neogene and Paleogene Molluscan (Bivalvia) Cenozones of the Russian Northeast.9
- Upper Cretaceous (Maestrichtian) Mollusca from the Haustator bilira Assemblage Zone in the East Gulf Coastal Plain9
- Unpublished census data from Atlantic coastal plain and circum-Caribbean Neogene assemblages and taxonomic opinions8
- A paleobiotic survey of Caribbean faunas from the Neogene of the Isthmus of Panama8
- Die Fauna des marinen Miozäns von Kevelaer (Niederrhein). Band 2 Bivalvia, Scaphopoda, Cephalopoda, Bryozoa, Annelida, Brachiopoda8
Each of the 416 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. 128 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 Cuspidariidae
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- George Brettingham Sowerby II
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Cuspidariidae 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 itCuspidarioidea through timeFormations of the Late CretaceousThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Dall 1886