Dermomurex pauperculus
Dermomurex pauperculus, common name the little aspella, is a species of sea snail, a marine gastropod mollusk in the family Muricidae, the murex snails or rock snails.

Manuel CABALLER · CC BY 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.
Time the record covers
At most 2.8 million years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 5.333 Mya and 2.58 Mya, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
2 occurrences of Dermomurex pauperculus on record, most of them in the Pliocene. 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- Pliocene100%
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
2 formations
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The named rock units Dermomurex pauperculus has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Dermomurex pauperculus and its relatives
PlioceneWhere Dermomurex pauperculus and its relatives were recorded in the Pliocene.
Found in the same rock
54 taxa- Alectrion losquemadica1 site
- Antillophos elegans1 site
- Barbatia (Barbatia) bonaczyi1 site
- Bursa grayana1 site
- Byssoarca zebra1 site
- Cassis sulcifera1 site
- Cerithium1 site
- Cerithium dominicense1 site
- Cerithium microlineatum1 site
- Chicoreus (Phyllonotus) praepauxillus1 site
- Chicoreus (Triplex) cornurectus1 site
- Clathrodrillia venusta1 site
- Clava plebeia1 site
- Conus (Atlanticonus) olssoni1 site
- Conus (Leptoconus) marginatus1 site
- Conus (Pyruconus) recognitus1 site
- Conus spurius1 site
- Coralliophilia miocenica1 site
- Crassispira (Crassispirella) hispaniolae1 site
- Crassispira losquemadica1 site
- Crassostrea virginica1 site
- Distorsio simillima1 site
- Drillia donalbertonis1 site
- Euclathurella (Euclathurella) vendryesiana1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 1 site for Dermomurex pauperculus, 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
2 references- Unpublished census data from Atlantic coastal plain and circum-Caribbean Neogene assemblages and taxonomic opinions1
- Cenozoic Muricidae of the Western Atlantic region. Part VI - Aspella and Dermomurex1
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 the Paleobiology Database's own record for the work.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Dermomurex pauperculus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Manuel CABALLER
- Licence
- CC BY 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Dermomurex pauperculus 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 itFormations of the PlioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Adams 1850