Malacostraca

Uncredited · CC BY-SA 3.0 · 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
- MulticrustaceaPBDB
- Diet
- omnivorePBDB
- Life habit
- epifaunalPBDB
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB
- Vision
- well-developedPBDB
Time the record covers
At least 505 million years on record.
The record covers at least 505.3 Mya to 11.7 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 509.7 Mya to 0 Mya.
9,507 occurrences of Malacostraca on record, most of them in the Eocene. 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
9,507 occurrences- Cambrianunder 1%
- Ordovicianunder 1%
- Silurianunder 1%
- Devonianunder 1%
- Carboniferousunder 1%
- Permianunder 1%
- Early Triassicunder 1%
- Middle Triassic1%
- Late Triassic1%
- Early Jurassic1%
- Middle Jurassic2%
- Late Jurassic6%
- Early Cretaceous8%
- Late Cretaceous16%
- Paleocene3%
- Eocene21%
- Oligocene5%
- Miocene18%
- Pliocene4%
- Pleistocene7%
- Holocene3%
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
1124 formations
- Sandakan Formation124
- Cercado Formation · Yaque Group85
- Ernstbrunn Formation81
- Palos Verdes Sand Formation65
- London Clay Formation64
- Pirabas Formation60
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The named rock units Malacostraca has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed. 1,100 further formations hold fewer occurrences each and are not listed. 3,756 occurrences have no formation on record, which is common for older literature.
Malacostraca and its relatives
EoceneWhere Malacostraca and its relatives were recorded in the Eocene.
Found in the same rock
2,781 taxa- Anomia argentaria69 sites
- Bryozoa62 sites
- Nuculana58 sites
- Syncyclonema58 sites
- Turritella58 sites
- Serpula55 sites
- Vertebrata55 sites
- Cymbophora53 sites
- Crassatella vadosa48 sites
- Cubitostrea tecticosta48 sites
- Veniella conradi48 sites
- Turritella trilira46 sites
- Camptonectes bubonis45 sites
- Exogyra (Exogyra) costata45 sites
- Striarca44 sites
- Crenella serica43 sites
- Granocardium43 sites
- Hamulus onyx42 sites
- Gabbigonia eufaulensis41 sites
- Corbula39 sites
- Cyprimeria39 sites
- Turritella vertebroides39 sites
- Caestocorbula (Caestocorbula) crassaplica38 sites
- Linearis38 sites
The Paleobiology Database records at least 1,157 sites for Malacostraca, and this reads 240 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
1,570 references- Fossil Crustacea of the Atlantic and Gulf Coastal Plain336
- The fossil stalk-eyed Crustacea of the Pacific slope of North America256
- Decapod crustacea of the Badenian191
- I crostacei associati a coralli nell’Eocene inferiore dell’area di Bolca (Verona e Vicenza, Italia nordorientale)174
- The genus Cancer (Crustacea: Brachyura): systematics, biogeography and fossil record165
- Miocene and Pleistocene Crabs (Crustacea, Decapoda) from Sabah and Sarawak161
- Cenozoic Decapod Crustacea from Southwest Japan147
- Decapod crustaceans from the Miocene Kukinaga Group, Tanegashima Island, Kyushu, Japan133
- Notes on North American Crustacea106
- Notes on North American Crustacea, in the Museum of the Smithsonian Institution. No. II104
- Crustacés décapodes nouveaux ou peu connus de l'époque Crétacique103
- Neogene and Quaternary crabs (Crustacea, Decapoda) collected from Costa Rica and Panama by members of the Panama Paleontology Project97
Each of the 9,507 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. 1,558 further references are not listed. 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 Malacostraca
- Source
- Wikidata/Commons
- Credit
- nobody named on the record
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 3.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Malacostraca 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 itMulticrustacea through timeFormations of the EoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Latreille 1802)