Lybia
Lybia is a genus comprising eight species of small marine crabs from the family Xanthidae. Commonly known as boxer crabs and pom-pom crabs, these crabs are famous for their symbiosis with small aquatic invertebrates, particularly sea anemones, which they hold in their specialized claws for defense, and in some cases, feeding. The genus has a diverse distribution, ranging across the Indo-Pacific and existing as early as the Middle Miocene.

Photographer: User:Dawson · CC BY-SA 2.5 · 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
- PolydectinaePBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Decapoda
- Life habit
- infaunalPBDB, for Xanthoidea
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Malacostraca
- Vision
- well-developedPBDB, for Malacostraca
Time the record covers
At most 12 million years on record.
The one occurrence read is dated to somewhere between 23.04 Mya and 11.63 Mya, which is a dating window rather than a span.
1 occurrence of Lybia 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
1 occurrences- Miocene100%
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 Lybia has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Lybia and its relatives
MioceneWhere Lybia and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
19 taxa- Carpilius1 site
- Daira perlata1 site
- Dynomene shinobui1 site
- Eriphia sp.1 site
- Eurozius angustus1 site
- Eurozius bidentatus1 site
- Galathea keijii1 site
- Leptodius crosnieri1 site
- Leptodius morrisi1 site
- Liomera1 site
- Medaeops megamiensis1 site
- Megamia anaglypta1 site
- Palaeoxanthops minutus1 site
- Palaeoxanthops okumurai1 site
- Paraxanthias fujiyamai1 site
- Petrolisthes miocaenicus1 site
- Pilodius parvus1 site
- Trapezia1 site
- Trapezia brevispinosa1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 1 site for Lybia, 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
1 referenceEach of the 1 occurrence 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 Lybia
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Photographer: User:Dawson
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 2.5
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Lybia 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
- Source
- Wikipedia, “Lybia”
- 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 itPolydectinae through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. Milne Edwards 1834