Hydrolithon

Derek Keats from Johannesburg, South Africa · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikidata/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
- HydrolithoideaePBDB
- Diet
- "photoautotroph"PBDB, for Rhodophyta
Time the record covers
At least 55 million years on record.
The record covers at least 56 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 59.24 Mya to 0 Mya.
126 occurrences of Hydrolithon on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. 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
126 occurrencesThese 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
9 formations
- Taballar Limestone Formation10
- Navarri Formation2
- Nago Limestone Formation1
- Ironshore Formation1
- Kaigunbo Formation1
- Qom Formation1
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The named rock units Hydrolithon has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 107 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Hydrolithon and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Hydrolithon and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
206 taxa- Lithophyllum29 sites
- Mesophyllum26 sites
- Neogoniolithon25 sites
- Lithothamnion23 sites
- Lithoporella21 sites
- Spongites16 sites
- Porolithon13 sites
- Pocillopora verrucosa11 sites
- Porites11 sites
- Acropora9 sites
- Sporolithon9 sites
- Acropora humilis8 sites
- Jania8 sites
- Titanoderma prototypum8 sites
- Corallina7 sites
- Goniastrea stelligera7 sites
- Lithoporella melobesioides7 sites
- Acropora hyacinthus6 sites
- Acropora robusta6 sites
- Carpenteria6 sites
- Homotrema6 sites
- Porites lobata6 sites
- Aethesolithon problematicum5 sites
- Amphiroa5 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 56 sites for Hydrolithon, 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
43 references- Sealevel history recorded in the Pleistocene carbonate sequence in IODP Hole 310-M0005D, off Tahiti18
- Late glacial to deglacial variation of coralgal assemblages in the Great Barrier Reef, Australia10
- Coralline algae from the Miocene Mahakam Delta (eart Kalimantan, southeast Asia)10
- Variation in deglacial coralgal assemblages and their paleoenvironmental significance: IODP Expedition 310, "Tahiti Sea Level"8
- The impact of the Mid-Pleistocene Transition on the composition of submerged reefs of the Maui Nui Complex, Hawaii8
- Dominance of coralline algae in the South China Sea: Insights into their responses to paleoceanographic events over the last 20 million years7
- Rhodoliths from deep fore-reef to shelf areas around Okinawa-jima, Ryukyu Islands, Japan6
- Mass mortality following disturbance in Holocene coral reefs from Papua New Guinea5
- Postglacial growth history of a French Polynesian barrier reef tract, Tahiti, central Pacific4
- Coralline Algae at the Paleocene/Eocene Thermal Maximum in the Southern Pyrenees (N Spain)3
- Deglacial mesophotic reef demise on the Great Barrier Reef3
- A 300000-yr coral reef record of sea level changes, Mururoa atoll (Tuamotu archipelago, French Polynesia)3
Each of the 126 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. 31 further references are not listed. 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 Hydrolithon
- Source
- Wikidata/Commons
- Credit
- Derek Keats from Johannesburg, South Africa
- Licence
- CC BY 2.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Hydrolithon 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.
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itHydrolithoideae through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Foslie 1909