Littorina obtusata
Littorina obtusata, common name the flat periwinkle, is a species of sea snail, a marine gastropod mollusk in the family Littorinidae, the winkles or periwinkles.

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
- LittorinaPBDB
- Diet
- grazerPBDB, for Littorinidae
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB, for Littorinidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Littorinidae
- Vision
- limitedPBDB, for Gastropoda
Time the record covers
At most 763 thousand years on record.
Every occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 774 ka and 11.7 ka, and nothing in the dating separates them, so that window is what the record shows rather than a span.
5 occurrences of Littorina obtusata 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
5 occurrences- Pleistocene100%
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
Loading coastlines…
The named rock units Littorina obtusata has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 4 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Littorina obtusata and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Littorina obtusata and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
11 taxa- Coronula diadema1 site
- Delphinidae1 site
- Dentaliidae1 site
- Globicephala melas1 site
- Halichoerus grypus1 site
- Mytilus galloprovincialis1 site
- Nucella lapillus1 site
- Pecten maxima1 site
- Physeter macrocephalus catodon1 site
- Teredo1 site
- Trivia1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 1 site for Littorina obtusata, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too.
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
5 references- Ressources complémentaires et mobilité dans le Magdalénien cantabrique. Nouvelles données sur les mammifères marins, les crustacés, les mollusques et les roches organogènes de la Grotte de Las Caldas (Asturies, Espagne)1
- Unpublished census data from Atlantic coastal plain and circum-Caribbean Neogene assemblages and taxonomic opinions1
- Lateglacial oceanographic conditions off Southwest Iceland inferred from shallow-marine deposits in Reykjavik and Seltjarnarnes Peninsula1
- The marine Pleistocene mollusks of Bermuda1
- Recherches sur le Neogene et le Quaternaire marins de la cote Atlantique du Maroc1
Each of the 5 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 content1
Picture of Littorina obtusata
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- H. Zell
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Littorina obtusata 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 itLittorina through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Linnaeus 1758)