Erosaria spurca
Naria spurca, common name the dirty cowry, is a species of sea snail, a cowry, a marine gastropod mollusk in the family Cypraeidae, the cowries.

H. Zell · 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- Sits inside
- ErosariaPBDB
- Diet
- omnivore, grazerPBDB, for Cypraeidae
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB, for Cypraeidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Cypraeidae
- Vision
- limitedPBDB, for Gastropoda
Time the record covers
At least 13 million years on record.
The record covers at least 13.82 Mya to 129 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 15.98 Mya to 11.7 ka.
30 occurrences of Erosaria spurca on record, most of them in the Miocene. 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
30 occurrences- Miocene74%
- Pliocene20%
- Pleistocene7%
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 Erosaria spurca 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.
Erosaria spurca and its relatives
MioceneWhere Erosaria spurca and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
183 taxa- Cassis sulcifera3 sites
- Chicoreus (Triplex) cornurectus3 sites
- Lobatus haitensis3 sites
- Luria isabella3 sites
- Malea elliptica3 sites
- Pseudozonaria raymondrobertsi3 sites
- Trigoniocardia (Trigoniocardia) haitensis3 sites
- Antillophos (Antillophos) moorei2 sites
- Aphera islacolonis2 sites
- Argopecten eccentricus2 sites
- Argopecten thetidis2 sites
- Bivetiella epistomifera2 sites
- Bursa grayana2 sites
- Cerithiidae2 sites
- Charonia variegata2 sites
- Conus (Pyruconus) haytensis2 sites
- Conus (Stephanoconus) sewalli2 sites
- Conus catenatus2 sites
- Cymatium (Gutturnium)2 sites
- Cymatium praefemorale2 sites
- Cypraecassis testiculus2 sites
- Distorsio mcgintyi2 sites
- Distorsio simillima2 sites
- Julia2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 4 sites for Erosaria spurca, 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
4 references- Unpublished notes on Caribbean collection of the Naturhistorisches Museum Basel20
- Unpublished census data from Atlantic coastal plain and circum-Caribbean Neogene assemblages and taxonomic opinions8
- Late Pleistocene gastropods from the raised reefal limestone of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia: taxonomic and palaeoenvironmental implications1
- The marine Quaternary of the Canary Islands1
Each of the 30 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. 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 content2
Picture of Erosaria spurca
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- H. Zell
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
3D model
- Source
- Sketchfab
- Credit
- multimediapackreplicator
- Licence
- CC Attribution
- Commercial use
- cannot be read from the licence given — check the record
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 itErosaria through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1758)