Helicodonta
Helicodonta, common name the "cheese snail", is a genus of air-breathing land snail, a terrestrial pulmonate gastropod mollusk in the subfamily Helicodontinae of the family Helicodontidae.

Francisco Welter Schultes · 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
- HelicodontidaePBDB
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB, for Gastropoda
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Gastropoda
- Vision
- limitedPBDB, for Gastropoda
Time the record covers
At least 13 million years on record.
The record covers at least 13.82 Mya to 774 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 15.98 Mya to 129 ka.
2 occurrences of Helicodonta on record, most of them in the Miocene. 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- Miocene50%
- Pleistocene50%
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
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The named rock units Helicodonta has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 1 occurrence has no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Helicodonta and its relatives
MioceneWhere Helicodonta and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
28 taxa- Apula coarctata1 site
- Archaeozonites1 site
- Carychium1 site
- Carychium (Carychium) galli1 site
- Cepaea eversa1 site
- Cepaea sylvestrina1 site
- Clausiliidae1 site
- Cochlostoma1 site
- Discus1 site
- Galba dupuyiana1 site
- Granaria1 site
- Granaria grossecostata1 site
- Gyraulus albertanus1 site
- Gyraulus applanatus1 site
- Helicidae1 site
- Limax1 site
- Milax1 site
- Oxychilus1 site
- Oxyloma minima1 site
- Planorbarius cornu1 site
- Pomatias1 site
- Pseudidyla moersingensis1 site
- Pseudochloritis incrassata1 site
- Triptychia1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 2 sites for Helicodonta, 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- The fossil pulmonate snails of Sandelzhausen (Early/Middle Miocene, Germany): Succineidae, Testacelloidea and Helicoidea1
- Tephrochronology and tephrostratigraphy of two Pleistocene continental fossiliferous successions from central Italy1
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 content2
Picture of Helicodonta
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Francisco Welter Schultes
- Licence
- Public Domain
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
3D model
- Source
- Sketchfab
- 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
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Helicodonta”
- 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 itHelicodontidae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Ferussac 1821